


Occultation

by Saathi1013



Series: Ephemerides [3]
Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Other, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, POV Third Person Limited, Polyamory, Polyfidelity, various permutations of Dee/Lee/Kara/Sam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-05
Updated: 2015-01-05
Packaged: 2018-03-05 14:04:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 22,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3122933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saathi1013/pseuds/Saathi1013
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After losing Billy, it had been like a switch had been flipped.  Dee had become greedy about every fleeting moment of joy, felt the near-misses more keenly, forged promises like a links in a binding chain, keeping those she loved close.</p><p><i>It’s probably not healthy,</i> she admonishes herself in retrospect.  It’s definitely not <i>wise,</i> especially given who she’s chosen to bind herself to.</p><p>But it’s all she has.  And it’s enough, for now.  More than this seems like asking for trouble, tipping the scales and straining the already-fraying knots they’ve wound themselves into.</p><p>(see author's notes)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Immediately follows the first fic in this au series, [Syzygy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/743546/chapters/1385244), continuing with the premise that the Quad of Doom worked out a different way (per _Caprica,_ group marriages are nbd, if uncommon, in the colonies). This story might not make as much sense without reading that one. Covers 'The Passage' through 'Crossroads.'
> 
> Again, Dee haters to the left.
> 
> ...I may have made [a graphic for this one](http://saathi1013.tumblr.com/post/107286455548/this-is-galactica-actual-starbuck-come-home).

Dee wakes up to the sound of the phone buzzing and a small, pained noise from Lee. "Don't worry," Dee says, "I'll get it." She slides out from under Sam's arm and goes over to the phone, glancing at the clock on the way. Not so early as she'd thought: only half an hour before reveille. That's all right, then.

"Dualla," she answers.

"Morning, Dee," the Admiral says, "You free for breakfast?"

Dee blinks. "Yeah, I can tell the others and--"

"Just you," he says. "See you in ten."

"...what?" she asks the empty line.

"Everything okay?" Lee asks quietly, and Starbuck mutters something in her sleep.

"Yeah," Dee whispers. She can dress in the dark, really she can, but there are more boots on the floor than she's used to dodging. She stubs her toe and bites back a curse.

"Hey," Sam says, feet scuffing on the deck, a denser shape in the darkness approaching as Dee buttons up her jacket. "What's up?"

"I'm getting breakfast," she says, then drops her voice to something even smaller than a whisper, "with the old man."

"Okay," Sam says, his hand warm on her arm.

Across the room, she hears Lee hiss, "What?" as he sits up in bed.

"Oh my _gods_ ," Dee says. "Go back to sleep; it's just _breakfast_." She keeps her voice dismissive, but she hasn't shared a meal with the Admiral in months, and that was with Lee present. Occasionally stilted then, even stranger now.

"Bring me back a biscuit," Starbuck grumbles, and Dee smiles in the dark, pulling on her boots.

"I'll do what I can," she promises, and tries to keep the hatch from creaking as she leaves.

 

* * *

 

"Come in," the Admiral says as he opens the door. His face is twelve different shades of awful, discolored with injuries from his time in the ring with Chief last night. Something must show in her expression, because he chuckles. "I know, but the Doc says there's no lasting damage. I'll get my good looks back in a week."

Dee smiles at that. "Good to hear, sir," she replies and steps inside. "There's an old line about falling apples and trees..." she offers, and he nods thoughtfully.

"I heard," he says. "I was hoping my fight would be the headliner last night, but..." He gestures for her to sit, and she does, finding two trays already set out for them.

"Thank you, sir," she says, sipping at the juice, thin and sharp from over-dilution. He settles into his own seat with a sigh, pouring coffee for both of them. She nods at the sweetener, shakes her head at the powdered cream substitute, and lets him take his time.

"Are they doing all right?" he asks, finally.

She stirs a pinch of dried fruit and a sliver of margarine into her oatmeal, appreciating the luxury. "They'll be fine," she replies. "Unpleasant to live with for a few days, but fine."

"Good," he says. "Let them know they're grounded, will you?"

Dee looks up, aborting her smile when she realizes he's being serious. "Sir?"

"Apollo and Starbuck are on the no-fly list for the next two weeks," he confirms. "And I don't want to see their faces at the morning meetings until their bruises are healed." He takes a careful sip of his coffee. "Emergencies excepted, of course."

"Of course," she echoes. "But--" Is he giving her orders? She doesn't know what this is, so she doesn't know if she can object, or ask _why_.

"I can tell them myself, if you'd prefer," he says equitably. "But I thought I'd let them sleep in." He pauses, then adds some of the margarine to his oatmeal. "Have some eggs, they're getting cold." She does as he suggests, knowing they're inedible when they aren't hot.

"How's Sam doing?" he asks after they eat for a few minutes.

"Fine," she says. "I think he likes flying." There's something about his stance when he's wearing a flight suit that seems... looser, easier. Almost _happy_ , despite everything else that's happened.

Adama pins her with a look. "And you?"

"Fine, sir," she says, and looks down into her empty cup. He picks up the carafe again.

"I've been hearing rumors," he says, pouring more coffee for both of them. It's good, stronger than what they serve in the mess. "I don't like what I hear."

"We're..." she almost says 'fine' again but that's a lie. "...doing okay. Better, I think."

"Good," he says, getting to his feet and waving her back down when she starts to do the same. "It occurs to me," he says, going to his desk and retrieving his glasses. "That I never gave any of you wedding presents." He shuffles a few stacks of books, checking their spines.

"You didn't -- don't -- have to--" Dee starts. He looks at her over the rims of his glasses, but there's a gentle smile on his bruised, craggy face.

"I don't lend books," he says, "and besides, if you don't like yours, you can always bring it back." She _gets_ it, then. Gets that he's teasing her, but hiding behind that is the earnest desire for her to accept his gesture.

Adamas have a hard time saying 'please.'

"All right," she says. And he hands her a stack of books, one at a time. Plain navy leather cover with gold stamping on the spine for Lee; pristine pre-war first edition for Kara, its pages yellowing but unbent. A battered, dense paperback for Sam. And something re-covered in brown paper for Dee, its spine creaking under her fingers as she takes it. "Thank you," she says, without looking at any of the titles. A small part of her is just a little overwhelmed at having an armful of books again, reminding her of school, of the Academy, of _home_.

"Thank you," she says. "For these, and... for the meal."

He nods and sits down again. "We should do it again sometime," he says offhand, but something in his voice belies the casual wording. He's not meeting her eyes, busy breaking his biscuit in two and using the rest of the margarine on it.

"We really should," she says, smiling. "I see you're done with your ship?"

He follows her gaze over to the model he's been building as long as she can remember. "Oh, no, I'm still working on the rigging. Delicate work, threading it through the masts. And there's still something missing," he muses.

"Have you figured out a name yet?" she asks.

"No," he says, looking at her again, still lost in thought. "You don't name it till it's finished."

"Well," she says. "I can't wait to find out."

 

* * *

 

The lights are on when Dee returns home, warmth and the sound of voices spilling out into the hallway when she cracks the hatch. "I come bearing gifts," she announces.

"What happened?" Lee says, looking up at her from his seat by the table. "What did he say?"

"We had a perfectly pleasant meal," she says. "And also: you're grounded."

She tries not to laugh at the look on his face, but it's very like Lee to be _relieved_ by a second-hand admonishment from his father. As if anything else would be cause for concern. Dee repeats the rest of their orders verbatim.

"Fine by me," Kara grumbles, still in bed, barely visible within the nest of blankets she's pulled around herself. Her leg sticks out at an awkward angle, propped up on a pillow. "I can yell at rooks from anywhere." Dee catches the lie; Starbuck's going to be climbing the walls in about eighteen hours, give or take.

"What's all that?" Sam asks.

"Belated wedding presents from the Admiral," Dee says, setting her armload on the table. "Also a biscuit, as requested. Heads up," she says, tossing it towards Kara, who catches it one-handed.

She hands the first to Sam. "Dragon Fighters of Kobol?" he reads aloud, a bemused smile on his face. Behind him, Kara suddenly sits up straight. Dee can now see that the bruises on her face are livid black stretching down the side of her jaw and neck, dark enough that Dee suppresses a wince just _looking_ at them.

"What?" Kara says. "No way!"

"Wasn't that a terrible movie?" Lee asks, going over to the head to fill a glass of water from the sink. A pill bottle rattles.

"We _do not speak_ of the movie," Kara says with a scowl. "I _loved_ that book. I read it when I was a kid, in the hospital... damn, it's been _forever_."

"So it's not terrible?" Sam asks, flipping it over to read the back cover.

"Oh, it could be crap," Kara shrugs. "I haven't read it since I was fourteen. But it made me wanna _fly._ " She looks over at Lee and beckons for the painkillers. He lifts his eyebrows in patently-feigned confusion. "My knee is killing me, Lee." He waits. " _Please?_ "

"This one's yours," Dee says, intercepting him as he takes the pills and water over to Kara. "And this one's for Kara."

"Hmm," he says, reading the spine, " _An Anthology of Sagittaron Verse._ "

Dee wrinkles her nose. "Eh," she says. "It's all _The Law of the Gods is Writ in the Land / And in our bones we can see the Hand / of divine Will..._ "

" _...that mortal Law echoes faint_ ," Starbuck continues from the bed, " _And mortal Sight can only limit, only taint._ " She dry-swallows a pill and chases it with the water. "The rhythm is shit, but it's not all _that_ bad."

"Grow up hearing it like Scripture," Dee says, "and you'll sing a different tune."

"Poetry," Sam muses. "...what's yours, Kara?"

Kara turns her book around so that it's right side up. "A biography of Daniel Greystone." She wrinkles her nose. "Why anyone would want to write about _him_..."

"Hey," Sam says. "He's not all bad. Greystone was responsible for rebuilding the C-Bucks franchise."

"And he created the Cylons with the profits," Lee adds. "Hell of a legacy."

"If any man needed a Prophet," Kara says, and sets the book aside. "Dee?"

"H'm?" Dee says. "Oh, mine?" She opens the cover. "Really?" she says to it. _"Zarek's_ book?" She flips through the pages, wrinkling her nose until she spots a tiny note in the margins: _contradicts page 38_. She keeps flipping, frown fading as she realizes that this is the Admiral's own copy, annotated extensively. _Blatantly stolen from Catallus,_ she reads. _Plaigarism #61._ She laughs.

"Not so bad?" Lee asks, hooking his chin over her shoulder to see. He chuckles when he sees. "Ah, my father's brand of humor. Fair enough. I've gotta go, rewrite today's CAP rotation in... half an hour, apparently."

Dee glances at the clock. "I should go, too. Are you two good here?"

Sam's settled in a chair, already paging through his book. "Yeah, of course."

Kara mumbles around a bite of her biscuit, "Frak off, we'll be fine," and throws a pillow at her. Dee rolls her eyes and heads off to the CIC.

 

* * *

 

Things settle into an unsteady rhythm over the next few days, helped along by the comfort and familiarity of military routine. Dee picks up the overnights from Sian, brings them to the Admiral in the mornings for his signature. If she gets up early enough, he offers her coffee at his desk. She offers little things in return, updates on Kara and Lee, how Sam's settling into the new structure -- now that things are crowded and less busy, less single-goal oriented, he's adjusting to the realization that he's a part of a whole new ecosystem, an extended network of comrades with its own internal politics and rivalries.

Dee doesn't like talking about herself, but he asks anyway, in roundabout fashion. He asks if she's spoken to Tigh, and she knows he's actually asking about New Caprica; he asks if their quarters are too small, and she knows he's asking if she's okay with the new living arrangement with her spouses. She answers as best she can -- a quiet "No, not really; we never were that close," and "Not really, but we're making it work," with a rueful grin - but has trouble voicing the full responses he seems to be seeking.

How can she tell her father-in-law that she and Tigh and Tyrol and even Laura ( _President Roslin_ , she reminds herself) have trouble looking at each other without memories dropping into their guts like cold stones. How they sometimes have trouble _not_ looking for each others' faces in a crowd in a crisis, when they each need a lifeline and reassurance that they'll _do_ something, anything, to deal with the latest situation... How can she tell him that she and Sam and Lee and Kara are learning to share space _and_ themselves in new ways that they hadn't anticipated when they first took their vows. That the neat lines between Sam-and-Kara in the settlement and Dee-and-Lee on the Pegasus got shattered and the new connections among _all_ of them that were spun in the aftermath feel fragile and precious, something that they each guard surreptitiously from the others _and_ from the outside, as if scrutiny will crush them back into fragments.

She doesn't know. She doesn't _know_. It's hard to articulate, even to herself.

Dee tells the Admiral that she isn't having any problems working with Gaeta, which is true, but doesn't tell him that seeing Gaeta in his blues is jarring, relief at seeing her reliable friend mixing with memories that tell her _This is not your friend anymore; he can't help you_. She tells him that she's liking the shorter shifts that come with two (closer to one and a half) crews collapsed aboard one ship, but doesn't tell him that it leaves her with long stretches of time that she can't fill with paperwork and the common areas are sometimes too raucous and home takes emotional energy that she doesn't always have after she's had a busy day in the CIC.

She doesn't tell him that when Kara's in the mood to pick a fight with anything that moves, Dee's not above taking the bait. That most nights, at least one (sometimes two) of the four spouses aren't sleeping in their quarters but in the familiar nest of a curtained bunk in the duty locker. It's not planned, and it's not (always) because of a fight; it just…. _happens_.

She tells him that she doesn't miss being Lee's XO on Pegasus, not really, now that they're travelling (running) again with the full Fleet to protect. She think he sees the lie mixed in with the truth, because he later schedules her to take the 2IC spot on the night shift once a week and bumps her up to full lieutenant.

The day she gets the news, everyone's home when she arrives. Dee kicks off her shoes and grabs her book, dropping onto one end of the couch and swinging her feet onto Sam's lap. He settles his elbows over her ankles and keeps reading the new Raptor formation packet. ("It's exactly like a pyramid playbook," he'd once commented. "Except with an extra dimension.")

After about fifteen minutes of companionable quiet, punctuated by Lee muttering callsigns under his breath as he works on duty shift change requests, Kara says from the bed, "Soooo… when were you planning on giving us the good news, Dee?"

"Good news…?" She didn't expect the rumor mill to work so quickly on this intel; it must be a slow week. "Oh. It's not that big a deal…"

She looks up to find Kara quirking an eyebrow at her with a badly-hidden grin bracketed unevenly by fading yellow bruises. Sam's looking at Dee, too, fond and expectant, and Lee's expression is incredulous. "Dee, you deserve recognition," Lee says, "You were a great XO, and I'm sorry you don't have a chance to show it more…" He's expressed regret at losing the Pegasus before, at the lives and essential resources lost at New Caprica, but never at what he'd lost _for her_. "But this is good, this is _something_ , and you earned it."

Dee looks back down at her book, feeling warmed all through to her fingers and toes. "It's doesn't really change that much, outside one night a week," she says.

Sam's hand rubs reassuringly at her ankle, then says, "Let's do something special. I can cook something if someone helps me raid the kitchen."

"Galley," Lee corrects, "and I can go with you. Being the Admiral's son should have some perks."

"You don't need to-" Dee says, and Kara throws a sock at her.

"Do _not_ turn down the golden opportunity of eating Sam's cooking instead of the slop Gus makes," Kara says.

"Hey," Lee says, "The man can make a steak."

"Yeah, and when's the last time you saw a steak?" Kara replies. "These days, we're lucky if we get jerky, let alone rehydrated beef. It's all beans and rice and potatoes and oats with soy protein, and even that's getting scarce. Even the market doesn't have fresh fruit anymore."

Lee gets quiet, the way he always does when the market is mentioned; he's never told her why. "Yeah, well," he says, "we're working on that."

"We'll see what we can scrounge up," Sam says firmly, and Dee curls her legs away from his lap so he can stand.

After their husbands leave, Kara looks over at Dee. "Wanna make out while they're gone, _lieutenant_?" she asks.

Dee tries to smother a laugh, and fails.

 

* * *

 

Sam and Lee come back with steaming bowls of noodles with tofu and the last of the burdock root from New Caprica. "Oh wow, that smells _amazing_ ," Dee says as Kara hops up from the couch, moving stiffly with her leg in a light brace but still quick to claim one of the bowls.

Lee tries to clear off the table, muttering about "civilized adults" while Kara snags a noodle with her fingers. Sam brings a bowl over to Dee and settles on the floor, his own food on the coffee table. Lee passes out utensils and napkins and drags a chair over, dropping into it with a sigh.

"Oh don't start," Dee says, grinning at him and blowing on her broth to cool it down, "You _like_ taking care of us."

Lee gives her a small smile. "I like taking care of _you_ ," he admits. "Sam can take care of himself, and _nobody_ can take care of Kara on their own, so…"

Kara kicks Lee in the shin while Sam chuckles around a mouthful of noodles. "...so it's good we have a whole team to do it," Dee says, smiling back, and Kara pokes her with an elbow.

The food is delicious, the noodles firm and the spices tingling pleasantly without overwhelming the earthy flavor of the burdock roots, even though they're a bit dry with age, more chewy instead of crisp. It's better than anything Dee's had since Pegasus, or those early days on New Caprica. Sam had cooked for them then, too, and she remembers him puttering around a single electric burner and singing absently in a surprisingly-pleasant voice.

Dee wonders if she should miss it, those early days when they'd still been getting used to each other. When she hadn't known that Sam was more stubborn than Kara, just _quieter_ about it. When Lee had been cautious and wary, expecting everything to collapse at any moment, and she'd felt the need to pick up the slack, fill in uncomfortable silences with jokes and questions and conversation.

Lee's worry had been confirmed, she supposes. Everything _had_ collapsed. Still, even with the changes, she doesn't want to lose what they have now.

The conversation flows around her as she thinks and eats, crew gossip and Kara griping about nuggets and Sam telling them about the informal pyramid league his former teammates have set up. "Not going to run off on us, are you?" Lee asks, as he starts to gather up their empty bowls.

"Oh, he's not going anywhere," Dee says, carding her fingers through the hair at the nape of Sam's neck. He's getting shaggy again; she kind of likes it.

He smiles up at her. "Yeah, I might stick around for a while."

"So long as you keep feeding us," Kara says, and leans over Dee's lap to kiss him. "Kiss the cook," she says against his mouth, and kisses him a second time for good measure.

Dee laughs and pokes her in the ribs. "Get off," she says, "You're crushing my legs." Kara squirms vaguely upright, and Dee bends to kiss Sam, too. "Thank you for cooking," she says.

When she sits up again, Lee stoops to grab the last two bowls and Dee is close enough to see the briefest hesitation before he turns to ghost his mouth against Sam's. The momentary pause seems to be an offer, not caution, and one that Sam takes with a low, pleased noise in the back of his throat as he leans in.

Dee's brain kind of stops for a second. Beside her, Kara tenses like a wire, then very deliberately relaxes.

When Lee stands upright again, he spots the expressions on Dee and Kara's faces, and widens his eyes in innocence, but Dee can see the hint of color on his cheeks, framing the healing cut high on the bridge of his nose. "What? Everyone else was doing it," he says, and Dee feels an incredulous giggle bubbling up behind her ribs and out.

"Guess I'm cooking more often," Sam says, grinning.

"Hey Lee, grab the booze while you're up," Kara calls out. "I want to drink a toast to Galactica's new graveyard-shift XO."

"You still on the meds?" Dee asks.

Kara snorts. "Gods, no. Cottle cut us off yesterday; I don't know whether it's because of supplies running low or because he wants to teach us a lesson. He was grumbling about both. But he says we can go back to work tomorrow, if the Admiral isn't still pissed at us."

Lee comes back with a jar of Chief's 'grease solvent,' two tumblers, a tin mug purloined long ago from the mess, and a chipped souvenir mug from the now-defunct gift shop. He pours a careful portion in each, and raises the tin mug. "To Dee, our newest LT and the best XO I've served with in the past -- and hope to again in the future." Unspoken are all the impossible miracles or calamities it would take for that to happen, but Dee appreciates it all the same.

"Hear hear," Sam says, and they all raise their glasses.

"And to you two getting your birds back tomorrow," Dee adds, and clinks her glass against theirs.

"Frak yeah," Kara says, and drinks deep. Dee's more cautious with her own liquor, the burn of it making her eyes water. "Where are the cards?" she says, digging around in the couch cushions. "I feel like getting lucky tonight."

"Don't you mean--" Sam says, finding them under Dee's discarded book on the floor.

"No she doesn't," Lee and Dee chorus, as Starbuck antes up one of her tanks. Lee looks warily amused, and Dee feels her skin humming in anticipation.

Sam deals the cards.

 

* * *

 

Dee would bet good money that Sam and Kara haven't had the "what happened on New Caprica while you were gone" talk, but it doesn't occur to her that they might have had the "what happened on Pegasus while _we_ were gone" talk… until Kara drawls, "So you two made up, huh," her eyes sly and knowing over the edges of her cards.

"I don't know what you mean," Lee says, already stripped down to his pants. "How many?"

"Three," Sam says, brow furrowing as he gets his replacements. Dee watches, her own cards tucked between her palms, waiting. He was probably chasing a run, and just busted; he'll lose his second tank (again) this round. Dee's got a high four up from the deal, and she's pretty sure there are enough caps left in the deck to try for six. Kara usually goes for high cards, full colors or a major, so she might have one of the Princes that Dee needs, or she could be bluffing with a perfect full.

Lee is distracted enough that he'll probably fold his almost-filled Colony, and lose his belt when he does.

"Two," Kara says, casual and at ease in her bra and pants, but with a pile of other people's shirts on the arm of the couch next to her and Sam's tags around her neck. She's rolling a pen cap around in her mouth like it's a cigar, actual tobacco too scarce now to waste casually, though from the way she's chewing on the plastic, she's jonesing a bit. "Don't play dumb, Lee, Sammy here told me all about you two."

" _Kara_ ," Sam says, quiet and a little chagrined.

"Two for me, too," Dee says, forfeiting her discards, "and details, please." She's a little chilly, Lee's jacket open over her bra, but she steals the last of Sam's drink to offset it.

"Oh, Lee didn't tell you?" Kara asks, grinning shark-sharp. "Our boys _bonded_ while we were gone." There's something dark and bitter lurking in the way she says 'gone' that sets off warning bells, and while Dee can't begrudge it -- even sympathizes with it -- neither does she want to ruin the pleasant bubble of calm they've maintained this evening.

"Look, Kara--" Lee starts.

"Taking any cards, there, Apollo?" Kara asks, and Lee looks down at his hand like they're printed in a foreign language.

"Uh, no," he says, "I fold," and Dee knows it's down to her and Starbuck. She gives him a reassuring smile as Sam bets Kara's belt, won in an earlier round.

Kara sees his bet with her tags and his, and adds a shirt. "No, no, Lee, I get it, we were gone, you have needs, it's the oldest story in the book."

Dee sees it (one of Kara's tanks, her own belt) and raises Lee's jacket.

"It wasn't like that," Sam said, pulling his own jacket -- won back from Dee last round -- from the floor and adding it to the pile.

"Oh it wasn't, huh," Kara says, sounding dubious. She adds Dee's jacket. "Raising a pair of pants, Sam, and if I win, you have to tell us what it _was_ like."

"Kara," Lee says. "I don't get it, what are we supposed to say here? We have nothing to apologize for, we're _married_ , and it's not like we hadn't ever..." He stops mid-sentence, with the consternated expression that says that he'd just caught himself about to lie.

Dee puts the pieces together; Lee's always been reticent about sex, not _generally_ but about articulating his own desires, but she knows enough from observation and their own awkward courtship that she thinks she understands. Like Dee, he's cautious about expressing physical attraction without a strong emotional connection, too -- though her bar for the latter is lower than his. And while Lee's been comfortable enough with Kara or Dee present to have Sam in his bed, too, his emotional attachments have almost always been for women.

And at some point, that had changed with Sam, sometime while they were on Pegasus and separated from New Caprica. Dee wonders if Lee just realized this, or if dawning understanding had spurred his anger and panic at Sam joining the rescue.

Dee stands up, shimmys out of her pants, and adds them to the pile. "I'm in," she says, breaking the wary silence.

Kara whistles. "The lady's in, Sam, how about you?"

Sam sighs. "I'm in," he says, and lays down a full major.

"Dammit, _you_ had my last Prince!" Dee says, laying down her five up.

"Kara?" Lee says. "What do you have?"

Reluctantly, Kara shows her low six up, beating Dee's hand but outmatched by Sam's. "Dammit," she says, "I almost had you."

Lee laughs. "Pay up, Starbuck," he says, as triumphant as if he'd won the hand. He raises his glass to Sam in a salute for a well-played round and knocks back the last of his drink.

"Yeah, yeah," Kara grumbles, shucking off her trousers and throwing them at Sam. He catches them, grinning. "So are you just… never going to tell us, or--?"

"You're not going to give this up, are you?" Sam says, laughing up at her, pulling the pile of clothes down onto the floor next to him. Dog tags and belt buckles clink against the edge of the table as they fall, caught up with the fabric.

Lee sighs, leaning forward to set his glass back down. "No, she's really not," he says, staring at Sam, deliberating.

Then Lee's sliding out of his chair, onto the floor, almost right into Sam's lap. "...oh, hey," Sam says, not actually protesting. His hands land on Lee's hips, comfortable and easy.

"Oh, _hey_ ," Dee echoes, eyebrows lifting. Beside her, Kara sits up a little on the couch and her fingers creep over to twine with Dee's.

"Wanna show 'em what they missed?" Lee asks.

"Rather you showed me what _you_ missed," Sam replies, and Lee breathes a faint laugh that gets cut off as he kisses Sam, careful and slow, his brow furrowed.

Dee appreciates the show, the sight of Sam's broad hand smoothing into the small of Lee's back, pulling their bodies closer, the way Lee just… _unwinds_ after a moment, as if he's forgotten that he's trying to prove something, his own hands coming up to frame Sam's face. But more than that, she likes the visible proof that they weren't just stuck on the Beast lashing out at each other, angry and powerless and _hurting_. She wonders how it happened, wishes she'd seen the first time they reached for each other like this, but Lee's not likely to tell her, and Sam probably has his own reasons for reticence.

Dee lets out a breath, then belatedly notices that Kara's grip has tightened painfully. "Ow."

The men break apart, and Kara lets go. "Sorry, Dee" she says, then stands. "Okay, come on, we are _not_ doing this on the floor. It's bad for my knee."

"I'm fine here," Sam says, leaning back on his elbows with an indolent grin. "How about you, Lee?" He rolls his hips and Lee hisses a breath between his teeth, looking genuinely _torn_.

"If you make us move the couch without you, you're sleeping down there," Dee says, as Kara shifts the coffee table out of the way.

"Yeah, okay," Lee says, standing.

 

* * *

 

Sam's fingers trace the lines of Lee's neck, thumb resting in the hollow of his clavicle. "Do you want--" he says, panting, and Lee shakes his head, arching up under Sam.

"Nah, this is good, this is--" Lee's breath catches, shudders as Sam changes angle, "--better than good, hah."

And Kara's teeth are on Dee's neck, her breasts against Dee's shoulder blades, her fingers busy between Dee's thighs, her voice a litany of reassurance and coaxing, "...yeah baby, I got you, come on, come _on_ ," like she's in her cockpit, hands on the controls, and oh _gods_ , that's going to make monitoring dogfights awkward but Dee doesn't _care_.

She trembles apart with Kara's voice in one ear and Sam's low moan in the other as he follows her over the edge.

 

* * *

 

Dee counts ships when she can't sleep. _Adrasteia, Adriatic, Amduatey, Aether, Argo Navis, Aurora, Azimenarius…_ When she reaches the end of the list, she goes back and lists those lost: _Cloud Nine, Olympic Carrier, Pegasus…_ She knows Lee and Kara carry their own lists, callsigns and vipers left in a broken trail behind them, mistakes they made that others paid in blood and necessary command decisions that cost the same.

Dee wonders if Sam has his own list, people he led in guerilla attacks and lost on Caprica.

 _Baah Pakal, Boreas, Breton, Carrilon Trader…_ It's the list of ships she counts before and after each jump, counts on the Dradis screen on the long, thankfully-quiet shifts when she's in charge of the CIC.

She's memorized them so she doesn't lose another.

 

* * *

 

Dee's halfway through _The Archer, Unchained_ , grateful that the book has a blank cover else she might attract some stares for snickering to herself over Zarek's writing. Really, it's the Admiral's notes in the margins that make it worthwhile; she's heard enough of this kind of polemic parroted by sullen teenaged boys back in high school that she can skim the actual print.

She doesn't -- she _doesn't_ \-- think about what it means in context of New Caprica, what she and the Resistance did to the Cylons. There's a _difference_ , she thinks furiously to herself. _There is._

 _There_ _has_ _to be._

Someone takes the empty seat next to her, and she drops the edge of the book to see Gaeta, studiously avoiding her gaze until he's settled. Only then does he spare a fleeting, furtive glance sidelong at her.

"Hey," he says. Something in her chest jumps in exultation, glad to have her friend back, wanting nothing more than to return to the days when they'd shoot the shit every lunchtime, griping about the XO and pointless drills and endless routine shifts. It feels like forever ago.

She sets down her book. "Felix," she says, voice steady as a stone.

"How--" he starts, then looks down at his tray, stabbing a small pile of mashed potatoes with his fork. "How are you, Dee?"

"Fine." Words congeal in the back of her throat, cold and dense. She finds herself saying, quietly, "I heard about what you did on New Caprica." His eyes shoot up, wide and shocked, and she wonders why, even as she clarifies, "Leaking us the intel. Thank you for that."

"Yeah," he mutters, and takes a bite of his food, swallowing hard before he speaks again. "I did what I could. And Dee…" He stares down at the table, meal forgotten. "I'm sorry. I never wanted…"

"Yeah," she says, but a small broken shard of herself settles back into place at his apology. She didn't expect it to mean so much, to hear those words, but it does. And yet: not quite enough. "But do me a favor, Felix?"

Gaeta glances up again, warily. "...what?"

Dee takes a deep breath, remembering what she'd had to become, the last time they'd had a conversation this long. "The next time you make me beg like that, you'd better bring a gun. 'Cos one of us is gonna end up eating a bullet."

She stands, gathering her book and her mostly-empty tray, realizing that there's a pocket of silence around their table. People are probably eavesdropping. _Staring_. She doesn't care. "Just… promise me that."

Gaeta stares up at her, and she doesn't blink, doesn't look away. "...yeah, okay," he chokes out.

Dee smiles, not unkindly but with enough regret in her eyes so he can see she's sorry she had to say that. "Then we're square. See you tomorrow, Felix." And she leaves him to his lunch.

If she'd known that was the last regular meal she was going to have, she'd have stayed to finish it.

 

 

* * *


	2. Chapter 2

When the food processors get contaminated, the whole Fleet scrounges for crumbs while the Raptors hunt for a food source. Protein-rich algae isn’t something that Dee ever thought she’d be thankful for -- much less a planet full of it with a debris ring, orbiting an unstable sun, behind a highly-radioactive star cluster -- but it’s their only option.

The trips through the cluster are Dee’s worst nightmare. Navigation next to impossible, nothing but voices crying out for each other over the roaring static of the stars, ships slipping through their fingers one by one, some never to be seen again. And through it all, a gnawing hunger that makes everyone unsteady on their feet, dropping to the deck when they’ve pushed themselves too far.

Dee doesn’t play favorites, relays the count aloud in order, losses and recoveries both growing tallies on the board. But she’d be lying if she said that her heart didn’t rattle every time she waits to hear their voices:

_Longshot, clear, I’ve got Galatea._

_Starbuck here with the Persephone._

_This is Apollo; I have the Diomedes._

Again and again and again. Five jumps, five passenger transfers, five long long stretches of time while her breath comes thin until she hears their names.

_Adrasteia, Amduatey, Aether…_

_Adama, Anders, Thrace…_

They lose the Adriatic, the Carina, and the Odysseus.

They lose Kat.

When it’s all over, Dee goes home to an empty bunk, pulling all the blankets and pillows tight around her, a hollow in the pit of her stomach that she tries to ignore. It’s blessedly dark, blessedly quiet, blessedly _empty_ after the crowds of civilians ferried off and back onto their ships.

She clutches a pillow to her chest and counts names. Gods and goddesses; demigods, monsters, and heroes. Three fallen to the furnace of the stars, and one frail human pilot among them, trying to guide them safely through.

Dee does everything she can to avoid the truth that she’s glad it wasn’t them -- the ones she calls _hers_. It could have been any one of them lost in transit, fading in a hospital bunk, faces ashen and hair shedding in clumps. _It could have been_ , and she’s ashamed of the fierce, desperate relief she feels that it _wasn’t_.

She knows that when the door opens, it’s not Kara, because the footsteps are too loud. She knows it’s not Lee because he doesn’t call her name. Sam just strips down and burrows behind her under the tangle of covers, arms finding her waist and his knees slotting behind hers easily.

She never thought they’d fit together so well.

“Kara?” she asks, even though she knows -- she _knows!_ \-- they’re fine. “Lee?”

“Kara’s in the Hall,” he says. “Lee might be with her.” That’s good; Kara needs someone to relay her home, and Dee’s not up to the task tonight. Neither is Sam, it seems. “...I wanted to make sure you weren’t alone,” he whispers in the dark.

She huffs a humorless laugh against the comforter.

“I mean it,” he says. “I almost lost the Sargon,” he says.

“I know,” she reminds him.

“I just… don’t want you to be alone.” And she gets it. Skeleton crews lost and burning in the sky between suns too close for survival, and Sam needing to be an anchor with more than just his blurring eyes and his raw voice calling into the light.

Dee twines her fingers in his and lets him hold on. Lets herself _be anchored_ , and finds that she needs it as much as he does.

 

* * *

 

Dee volunteers for the algae planet crew, and it’s not just because volunteers get the first crack at the dubious first batch of foodstuffs produced by the chemists. Her skin itches, and she can’t stay in the same patterns right now without feeling like her bones are rattling in their sockets. Dirtside hauling should settle her down, some.

Sam volunteers to coordinate the civilians, since those team leaders are mostly buddies of his from the pyramid league; Lee coordinates the military teams thanks to the old man. This leaves Kara, erratic and swinging in wild ecliptic from remote to too-clingy after the passage, stuck on donut runs, which seems to suit her moods just fine.

“She’s coming in a little hot, isn’t she?” Dee asks Lee, shading her eyes and looking up as they leave the prefab building they’ve set up as makeshift HQ.

Lee shakes his head, snags Sam by his elbow, and they all put out their closed fists.

“On three,” Sam says. “One, two, three.”

Lee and Dee both throw paper. “You can go this time,” she says to Lee. “And _you_ gotta stop throwing rock three times out of five,” she tells Sam, and he makes a face at her before he turns to Tyrol to continue discussing material transfer.

Dee heads back into the shade, feeling her face heat up as she remembers the last time Kara had come planetside.

“ _I was hoping it’d be you,” Kara had said, looping her arms around Dee’s wrist and nuzzling up behind her ear._

“ _Oh, hey, what? Why?” Dee had asked, suppressing a giggle as Kara’s teeth scraped right against the sensitive line of her neck._

“‘ _Cos Sam bet me that you wouldn’t let me do_ _this_ _\--”_

_And really, Dee knows how Kara is about bets. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that she’d given into the inevitable, leaning back against the ECO panels, Kara kneeling on the deck with a triumphant gleam in her eyes. Dee had wound her fingers through Kara’s sweaty blonde hair and hung on for the ride._

Dee still doesn’t know what Kara won from Sam, but for her part, it had been totally worth it, despite the risk of getting caught.

She wonders if Lee’s getting the same treatment, and shivers at the mental image despite the heavy heat in the air.

 

* * *

 

Then, predictably: Cylons.

Dee doesn’t care about the Temple -- she doesn’t even know if she cares about Earth, having been burned so badly on the mirage of safe haven once already -- so she’d hit the detonator herself, even if it meant dying on this godsforsaken rock.

But since she’s not alone -- since triggering her own death means the others would die, too -- she follows orders.

She follows them right up until Starbuck’s raptor goes down, and Lee tells her to hold her post.

“I can get her, Lee,” she says.

“Lieutenant, you have your orders,” he says, and she can hear the despairing edge to his voice, even through the static. _He doesn’t want to lose us both_ , she thinks.

This place is nothing like New Caprica: this vista is hot and dusty and bright, with scrubby, stony hills instead of a flat sandy delta. She squints out over the ridge at the smoke plume rising like a beacon. The air tastes the same on the back of her throat, though: acidic, desperate, futile.

Dee draws her gun, and points it at Fisher. “I’m going to disobey orders, but you won’t,” she tells him. “Stay with the rig. I’ll be back before you know it.”

He nods, and she holsters her weapon before she takes off, dodging the bullets as she scrambles down the ridge.

 _Kara’s going to kill me if I die trying to save her_ , Dee thinks grimly as she skids on the scree. She hits the gully on her palms and one knee and grits her teeth at the sting, springing back up to sprint clumsily across the uneven ground, gunfire dogging her heels at every step. Ducking around the edge of a deep crease in the dirt, she spies the raptor’s hull and bolts for the open hatch, praying.

Starbuck almost shoots Dee, but lowers her gun when she sees who it is. There’s a morpha kit abandoned on her lap. “Oh,” Kara says weakly, tear tracks through the grime on her face and her gloves melted onto the skin of her hands. “I was hoping it’d be you.”

Dee rolls her eyes and stabs through Starbuck’s suit with the morpha needle.

 

* * *

 

“You could’ve been killed!” Lee says when it’s all over and done, just shy of shouting as they’re all clustered in a corner of the medbay. “I should bring you up on charges.” Dee doesn’t say anything, chin held high as he tries to glare her down.

“Yeah but you _won’t_ ,” Kara grins from the bed, her hands wrapped up in mittens of gauze, a little loopy from the painkillers.

“ _Kara_ ,” Sam says quellingly.

“Uh uh, no way,” Kara says, awkwardly trying to push herself upright on the pillows using only her elbows. “Tell me you wouldn’t have done the same thing, Sam.” He looks away from her adamant stare. “And how many times have you pulled some stupid reckless stunt for us, Lee? You _broke a whole Battlestar_ to get us off of New Caprica.”

“Not just you,” Lee says, but he’s not meeting her gaze, either.

Kara snorts. “Keep telling yourself that, Apollo. The point is, you’re both hypocrites, and I’m damn grateful to Dee for pulling my ass out of the fire. Grateful enough for all three of us, so you’re just… _redundant_ right now.” She looks around. “Where are my pants? I wanna get the frak out of here.”

 

* * *

 

The next day, Dee goes down to Dogsville. She watches Helo handle the endless litany of complaints and well-meaning advice from civvies who don't understand what rationing is, or that they're each just one small fraction of a larger ship, a larger whole. She doesn't know how he can take it; just walking into the repurposed storage bay is like being hit with a wall of sound. And that’s without being the focus of everyone’s demands, their ire, their complaints...

 _They should assign someone here full-time_ , she thinks. _Give Helo time to spend with his family._

“Go,” she says in the briefest pause between petitioners, seeing the strain lurking in the back of his eyes. Worry is pulling his mouth tight and his jaw clenched, and she knows how that feels. “I'll take notes, give you a report when you come back.”

“You sure?” he asks, but he's already on his feet. She smiles reassuringly.

“Yeah,” she says. “Get your ass outta here.”

“Thanks, Dee,” and claps her on the shoulder as he goes.

She takes his seat, glad to be doing something. “Hi,” she says to the next person in line. “I'm Lieutenant Dualla,” she says. “What can I do for you?”

 

* * *

 

She sits down with Gaeta and Tyrol at lunch. Gaeta gives her a quick, alarmed glance, but she smiles a little like she used to, and his mouth quirks up in response, shoulders relaxing. “...Cally and I never get any time together when we’re not working, sleeping, or taking care of Nicky,” the Chief’s saying. “It sucks, but what can we do?”

“I can watch him once in a while,” Felix offers. “I mean, you’ll have to give me the crash course, but I don’t mind.”

“No, man,” Galen says, shaking his head. “I’m not recruiting; we can handle it. I’m just venting.”

“Chief,” Dee says gently, “Take the help. You need it. Nobody expects you to do everything on your own. We’re all we’ve got -- and if we’re offering, we mean it.”

Galen’s mouth slants up in a crooked line, grudging acknowledgement in the set of his shoulders. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, all right.”

Dee and Gaeta have the CIC and flight schedules memorized; Tyrol knows the deck shifts. Among the three of them, they carve out a couple of nights a week for the Tyrols to get a few hours free.

Galen spends the rest of the time ‘warning’ them about Nicky’s antics, most of which are hilarious and adorable; only a few are unbelievably horrifying. She laughs until she cries during a changing story, until Galen says, “...but really, if it’s only a couple hours, it shouldn’t be too bad. I appreciate the help, really.” He shifts, starts pulling his tray and silverware and trash together in a neat pile and then standing.

“No problem, Galen,” Felix says. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Me too,” Dee adds, catching her breath and gathering her things, too.

“And who knows,” Galen says, grinning, “The practice might come in handy someday.”

Felix hides a smile. “I don’t know about that,” he says, eyes darting sideways. Dee follows his glance and sees Hoshi sitting with some of the other CIC crew. _That’s new_ , she thinks, before he adds, “Maybe for Dee…”

Her eyebrows lift to her hairline. “Oh no,” she says, shaking her head. “We’re not really… _no_.” They haven’t actually talked about it, but she knows enough to predict how the conversation will probably go.

“Come on,” Galen says. “There are four of you. It should be a snap.”

“Three of us are pilots,” she says. “One of us is Starbuck, and another one of us is _Lee_. I wouldn’t wish us on anybody, let alone a kid.”

“Well,” Tyrol says, shooting her a wry look, “I’m trusting you with mine, so better suit up.”

 

* * *

 

Dee works the rest of her shift on autopilot, her brain ticking over the possibilities, stymied every time. It’s not that she _wants_ kids; once upon a time, she’d thought of it in a vague sense, in the maybe-future, after she’d pursued her career, worked her way up the ranks.

Then the attack on the Colonies ripped through her goals, nebulous and concrete alike. Perpetual pursuit and erratic uncertainty made long-term planning seem like a pre-emptively broken promise, which was why Billy -- her mind stutters a little, remembering -- why Billy’s proposal had thrown her for a loop.

She hadn’t been serious about Lee then, either. They’d just had conveniently-aligning leave, and she wanted to get off Galactica, so she’d suggested the Cloud Nine.

 _Then_.

Dee turns the dial up, loses herself in static and the chatter of the CIC and the sporadic updates from other ships. She counts her breaths, trying to not remember Lee’s blood on her hands or Billy’s glassy gaze on the floor of the bar.

It doesn’t quite work, but she keeps her composure.

After losing Billy, it had been like a switch had been flipped. She’d become greedy about every fleeting moment of joy, felt the near-misses more keenly, forged promises like a links in a binding chain, keeping those she loved close.

 _It’s probably not healthy_ , she admonishes herself in retrospect. It’s definitely not _wise_ , especially given who she’s chosen to bind herself to.

But it’s all she has. And it’s enough, for now. More than this seems like asking for trouble, tipping the scales and straining the already-fraying knots they’ve wound themselves into.

 

* * *

 

The last thing Dee wants when she gets off duty is to face Lee, whatever additional anxiety he’s built up in her absence about her rescuing Starbuck. She goes to the duty locker and strips off her jacket and shoes before claiming Kara’s rack, knowing someone will wake her eventually. It’s nice, the familiar noise of off-duty crewmen jostling for space and goofing off; laughter and the scuffling of boots on the deck filter past the curtain, reassuring and _normal_.

When she slides her hand under her pillow, she finds two photographs.

One looks like the mandala from the temple -- how Starbuck got it, she’ll never know. The other looks like a child’s scribble of the same thing, until she squints and sees that it’s a fragment of a wall mural, wild and loose with handpainted text overlapping one side of it. It looks like -- Kara’s handwriting?

Dee frowns, and tucks both photos on the shelf. _I’ll ask her about it later_ , she thinks, and closes her eyes to rest, still mostly dressed but too tired to care.

 

* * *

 

“Hey,” a familiar voice says. There is a hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her.

“Hey, Sam,” Dee mumbles, rubbing the crust out of her eyes with her knuckle. “What time is’t?”

“Just after dinner,” he says. “I grabbed some protein bars before I came looking for you. Want one?”

“You didn’t have to,” she says, and then her stomach rumbles protest. His eyes crinkle in silent amusement. “...yeah, okay,” she admits. “But you didn’t have to. Thank you.”

“Well, I wanted to offer something in apology,” he says.

“What?”

“I shouldn’t have let Lee yell at you like that. It was stupid, and we were worried, and I let it--”

She sits up, shrugging. “I get it. I’d probably be pissed, too.”

Sam crawls past the curtain, folds himself into the other corner of the rack, handing her the protein bars. She unwraps one and eats, still sluggish from sleep but happy to have company while she boots up again.

“Lee’s sorry, too,” he offers.

“Lee can tell me that himself,” she retorts, softening it with a smile.

“Fair,” he concedes. He pulls down a candle from a shelf and rolls it absently between his palms.

“Hey, Sam?” she asks, after she finishes off the first bar. His eyebrows rise up in query. “Did you ever… Do you want kids?”

He looks like she’s slapped him, mouth agape and eyes wide. “Why? Are you--”

She smothers an incredulous laugh. “No! No, I just… we’ve been married a while, and we never really talked about it. I used to assume, since you settled planetside with Kara, that it wasn’t really a priority for you, but.” She shrugs. “People are starting to talk like that’s what we’re supposed to _do_ next.”

His expression turns wistful. “Yeah. I don’t know. I used to think that when I retired, or when I blew out a knee or something, that I’d buy a big house, have a lot of kids. Like, a whole _bunch_.” He frowns sadly. “I used to dream of singing them to sleep.” He catches her smile. “Shut up, I can sing.”

“I remember,” she says. “I just like the mental picture, is all.”

“Then everything went to shit, and… well, it seemed silly to hold onto that after everything. When we were on New Caprica, I wondered… but Kara always balked around kids, and I worked out some stuff about her childhood from bits and pieces that she dropped here and there, so it didn’t seem like...”

“Yeah,” Dee said.

“I figured after a couple of years, when we’d all settled in together, when we figured out how the four of us worked, that it’d come up. Maybe thought that you and Lee might mention it, I don’t know. I figured it’d all sort out eventually.” He shakes his head. “Should have known better.” Dee nods, and he glances at her, cautiously. “What about you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to say no, but now’s a shitty time to think about it.”

“Yeah, but you seem to be thinking about it anyway. What _do_ you want, Dee?”

She furrows her forehead, sighing. “I don’t know. Some peace and quiet so I can figure out what I want, I guess. Some stability so that we can make plans and know we can follow through?” She picks at the fraying edge of the pillowcase. “Maybe if we find Earth. Maybe. If it’s not a pipe dream... if it’s not another mirage that’ll vanish if we get too close.”

“You believe in Earth?”

“Gotta believe in something,” she replies. “Till then, I got my implant. And I _do_ believe in the miracle of modern science, I can tell you that much.”

He grins wide. “...wait, aren’t you Sagittaron?”

She pushes out her jaw, scowling. “Oh, you did not just.” She shoves at his legs with her feet, and he catches them in his hands, fingers curling around her instep, tickling.

Their tussle escalates until they fall out of the bunk in a tangle, knocking knees and elbows against the deck plating.

“Hey,” Hotdog says, peering down at them from his rack. “You should’ve hung your boots up if you wanted the room.”

Dee drops her head to Sam’s shoulder and laughs.

They untangle themselves, still snickering at each other. “Want to go home?” Sam asks, brushing off his pants.

Dee wrinkles her nose and steps into her unlaced boots. “Not really.”

“Nah, me neither.” His grin gets wider. “...wanna steal a Raptor?”

Dee thinks about it, grabbing her jacket. “I kinda already did that this week?” she says eventually, “Didn’t really work out.”

He offers her his arm; she slides her hand into the crook of his elbow, and they head out into the halls. He slows his pace to match hers, easy and smooth despite their height difference. “Wanna egg the CIC?” she asks.

She catches his double-take out of the corner of her eye, and manages to keep a straight face.

“No eggs,” he points out. “Unless we found some chickens on the algae planet…”

“Damn,” she says. “There goes that idea.”

“Joe’s?”

“All right,” she says, “first round’s on you, though.”

“Deal,” he says, and at the next junction, they go starboard.

 

* * *

 

It’s not really Dee’s kind of place, too crowded and too loud. Too many conversations, too many familiar voices, for her to focus. It's nothing like the easy off-duty chatter in the duty locker; it’s more like a victory party in the common room, except twenty times bigger and dimmer, with multiple dramas unfolding wherever she looks. And her proclivity for picking up chatter -- _eavesdropping on gossip_ , some call it, not quite understanding how instinctive it is by now, her impulse to process noise into signal -- makes it difficult to focus. The alcohol doesn’t help.

Sam’s in his element, though, she can see that much. There’s a triad arcade game set up, and he fleeces rounds out of overconfident viper jocks with a smile charming enough to deflect resentment. She sidles into a corner and watches, enjoying the show and the spoils of his triumphs that he shares.

Dee also spots Gaeta and Hoshi by the bar; she can tell by their body language that they’re edging closer, but trying to keep it quiet. She’s glad to see Felix smiling like that again.

She sees the looks that Seelix gives Sam, how she keeps hovering nearby, coming back during lulls when he’s got no willing victims. Diana says she needs to work on her aim, that she’s going to apply to the pilot training program and could use the help. Sam’s genial, but he’s careful with his hands, sending Dee wide-eyes glances every so often.

Dee smiles into her drink, resolving to put in a word with the old man, get Seelix her wings. Starbuck could use fresh meat.

She hears two marines talking by the wall -- sound carries in interesting ways, with slanted bulkheads and a Viper’s downward-angled wings in a partial dome overhead. “...prisoner ...hunger strike?” one is saying. She can’t see their faces, can’t remember where they’re stationed or who’s in the brig right now.

The woman is saying, “....what they did on New Caprica… only fair he...”

The first marine laughs. It’s not a _nice_ laugh.

Dee feels cold, sick with too much bad booze on too little food. Her head’s swimming. _Do we have a Cylon on board?_ she thinks. _They said ‘he.’_

_Oh my gods, is it a Leoben?_

She lurches away from the wall, sets her drink on the nearest flat surface, and pushes her way through the crowd to Sam. “I need to go,” she shouts up at him when she gets there. “It’s too loud.”

“Okay, okay,” he says. “I’ll come with you.” And he tosses the ball to the next in line, giving a distracted wave over his shoulder as they leave. “Where do you want to go?” he asks when the noise recedes.

“Someplace quiet,” she says.

“Home?”

“Lee won’t be _quiet_ ,” she says. “He’ll want to talk and _talk_ and--” Dee stumbles a little, and Sam’s arm comes around her shoulders. She leans into it gratefully.

“It’s late,” Sam says. “They’ll both be asleep.”

 _Have you_ _met_ _Lee?_ she wants to ask, but they’re almost home.

Sam turns out to be right. In the dim light, Lee and Kara are barely visible, curled back-to-back in the bed. Dee shucks off her outer layers as quiet as she can, pads over to the folded-out couch in her socks. Part of her wants to curl close in the middle spot, slip her hand over to cross the bridge between her and Lee, fall asleep with his heartbeat under her palm.

She doesn’t. She lets Sam take the middle. “Early morning,” she breathes quietly, and he nods, folding his arms around her.

In the dark, her mind is a whirlwind. _Prisoner_ , she thinks. _Cylon_. _Leoben_. _Kara_. Eventually, Dee finds the quiet center of the storm, and drops through it into sleep.

 

* * *

 

Waking bright and early -- or perhaps just early -- Dee rails against consciousness but forces herself through the haze anyway. She dresses in the dark, pops a couple of painkillers, and reminds herself that the Admiral has the _good_ coffee.

He also has answers.

Sian gives her the overnights with a sympathetic grimace. “You look like hell, Dee. Rough night?”

“Thanks,” Dee says. “And yeah, kinda. Is it really that bad?”

“I think you’ll survive,” Sian says. “Just watch out for the old man; he’s in a mood, from what I hear.”

“Better and better,” Dee replies. “Thanks for the heads up.”

She braces herself as best as she can before she knocks on the Admiral’s door. “Come,” he barks, and she resigns herself to not getting any answers today.

“Dee,” he says from his desk. “Good. I wanted to talk to you about the reports I got from the algae planet.”

“Yes, sir,” she says, handing over the overnights, the fuel status report, the shuttle schedule, and squares her shoulders. He signs them, glances up.

“Have a seat, Lieutenant,” he says. “And some coffee.”

“Thank you, sir,” she says, and does so gratefully -- and a little warily. He picks up a folder and starts paging through it, letting her wait.

“Lee’s report says that you disobeyed orders when you rescued Kara,” he says. “Fisher corroborates this, but everyone else’s report omits it.” He levels an inscrutable blue stare at her over the rims of his eyeglasses. “Including yours.”

Dee shifts in her seat. “I… I didn’t think it was relevant, sir.”

“You didn’t think Lee would mention it in an official report,” the Admiral supplies.

“Yes sir,” she admits. “I’m sorry. I can amend my report, sir.”

He turns back to the folder in front of him. “After reviewing all of the information,” he says with careful emphasis, “I’m inclined to think that Lee’s order was given while he was… emotionally compromised. Would you say that’s true?”

Dee looks down at her coffee. “I don’t know, sir, I--”

“He was afraid that a rescue op would result in more casualties,” the Admiral interjects. “But sometimes you have to take a risk to achieve a greater tactical advantage. If that sun hadn’t gone nova, we’d have needed that raptor in the standoff with the Cylons, and losing Starbuck would have been an additional blow to our combat force. It’s my belief that he should have approved the rescue, using whatever personnel was closest to achieving that goal. And that you proved yourself more than capable of doing so.”

“Thank you, sir,” Dee answers on autopilot, taken aback.

“I’m amending the report to omit your insubordination, so that we won’t have to have a formal inquiry,” the Admiral says. Then he gives her another steady _look_. “But don’t do it again.”

“I won’t, sir,” she says.

“...and if you do, don’t do it alone.” There’s something sly in the crinkle of his eyes, and she lets herself smile, just a little.

“Of course, sir.”

He flips the folder closed. “Finish your coffee,” he tells her. “I think it’s getting cold.”

She does as she’s ordered, letting her smile bloom behind the rim of the mug.

He starts reading another folder, one with the red bands of confidentiality. The grooves on his face seem to settle a little deeper, making him look as tired and worn as she feels this morning. She takes a breath, and dares. “He’s still not eating?” she asks carefully.

The Admiral’s eyebrows lift, and then he sighs. “Should have known better than to keep it from you, Dee,” he observes. “And since you’re now in the know, I can order you to keep quiet -- and to tell me who leaked the intel.”

“I overheard some marine chatter. I honestly don’t think anyone else could have heard them,” she says.

He nods. “I’ll trust your judgement on that, but I plan to have a word with them myself regardless.” A pause. “...and yes, Baltar’s still not eating. I don’t know what he hopes to accomplish, but whatever he’s after, he won’t get it from me.”

Dee’s gut flips when she hears the name. _Baltar_. _Not Leoben._ Her anxiety changes, becomes mixed with cold thin threads of rage that twine around her ribs, creeping out from her sternum.

She keeps her expression calm. Finishes her coffee. “Will that be all, sir? Sian’s waiting for me in the CIC.”

“That’s all,” he says, mustering a smile. “Go on, I’ll be along.”

“Thank you for the coffee, Admiral,” she says before she goes, smiling back even though her lungs feel like ice.

“Anytime, Dee,” he murmurs absently.

 

* * *

 

On her way to the CIC, she spots a cluster of pilots on the way to the briefing room for the morning rundown. She can hear Lee before she sees him, and cuts right through the crowd to grab her husband by his lapels. “Give us five minutes,” she calls over her shoulder and hauls him to the nearest empty locker.

“Hey, hey, what--” he’s saying before she slams the hatch. “What’s the big--” He gets a good look at her expression and sighs. “...you talked to the Admiral.”

“Yes,” she hisses, only vaguely surprised that it doesn’t come out as a chilly vapor. “You put me on report?” She shoves at him a little, using the momentum to back away more than anything else.

“Dee,” he says, “I wanted to tell you--”

“You put me on _report_ ,” she says again, enunciating through her teeth. “I could have gotten court-martialled. Demoted. Thrown in the _brig_.”

“That wasn’t going to happen,” he says, sounding too calm, too reasonable. He even tries a weak smile. “Do you know how many times I’ve reported Kara for disobeying orders?”

Dee lets out a frustrated snarl. “I. Am not. _Starbuck_ ,” she says. “You didn’t even _talk_ to me about it.”

“I tried--” he says, but she cuts him off.

“No, you _yelled_ at me,” she corrects.

“And then you disappeared! I tried to find you yesterday, stayed up half the night waiting--”

“Well, Sam found me,” she says. “So you couldn’t have looked very hard.”

“Dee--”

“ _No_ ,” she says. “You frakked up, Lee. You had the choice between waiting to tell me and delaying your report, or being the good son and getting your homework in on time, and you picked _wrong_.”

“That’s not fair,” he says, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “You disobeyed a commanding officer, Dee. You pulled a gun on Fisher, for frak’s sake. What was I supposed to do, sweep it under the rug because you’re my _wife?_ ”

“You could have _talked_ to me,” she says again, feeling hopeless and frustrated and nauseous with anger. “At least so that I could have given my report to the Admiral in person, to give my decision context and to plead my case… and so that I couldn’t be accused of falsifying my own report, too.”

Lee looks appalled. “Did he-- Are you--?”

“Oh, _now_ you’re worried?” Dee throws up her hands, pacing around in a half-circle, staring at the wall so she’s not looking as something she wants to _hit_. She’s starting to understand Kara’s whole ‘fight, frak, run’ approach to conflict resolution. She turns back around to jab a finger at Lee. “You should have _talked_ to me,” she says one last time, and swings the hatch open.

“Dee--” he calls after her, but she’s already gone.

 

* * *

 

“Um,” Felix says at lunch, his expression apprehensive when she looks up. “Can I sit here, or…?”

“Yeah, sure,” she says, shoving her book and her tray over to make room. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Well,” he says with a shrug, “You’ve been on edge all morning, and you’re glaring at that book like you want to set it on fire with your brain, so…”

Dee grimaces an apology. “...sorry. I hope I haven’t been too bad.”

He cocks his head, a sympathetic curl at the corner of his mouth. “I think even Tigh’s giving you a wide berth today, for what it’s worth.”

She folds her arms and drops her forehead down to the table. “Oh, Lords.”

“Wanna talk about it?” he asks.

“...no,” she moans into the table. “Maybe later.”

Felix pats her elbow reassuringly.

 

* * *

 

She sleeps in Starbuck’s rack again that night, just to give herself some space. When she wakes up, she feels better, but there’s a pressure behind her ribs reminding her that she still needs _resolution_.

There’s a fresh uniform on top of her boots when she gets up. A note falls to the deck when she shakes the creases out of the slacks.

 _Come home when you’re ready_ , it says in Kara’s familiar scrawl.

Dee smiles to herself and gets dressed.

 

 

 

* * *


	3. Chapter 3

Dee works her overnight shift as XO, taking the opportunity to look through some old tactical reports. She’s never been very good at three-dimensional geometry; she’d have failed astrometrics at the Academy if she hadn’t been dating the class genius. It had been an even trade, though -- Dee had helped her through advanced avionics.

Now, she kind of wishes Seph were there to laugh at her and take her step-by-step through these diagrams. She could ask Lee, if she were talking to him, or Sam, but he thinks about these things differently than she does. They don’t have a shared language. Kara’s got experience teaching this stuff, but she ends up in nugget-training mode and feeling talked-down to just makes Dee _more_ frustrated in the long run.

She’ll need to know this stuff cold if something happens, though -- and as they all keep learning: something _always_ happens, usually when they’re least prepared for it.

Dee sighs and resets the tactics display to the beginning of the skirmish, dragging the models back to their starting positions.

“Lieutenant,” Kelly says, coming over. “Why don’t you take a break? You’ve been reviewing logs all night. It’s quiet. You don’t need to know everything about running a Battlestar right this minute. Go get something to eat.”

She smiles at him and nods, grateful for the respite. “Sure thing, Captain.”

The mess is empty, so she just heats up a prepacked cup of noodles and takes it with her as she does the rounds, checking in with the marines on duty, making sure everything’s secure. Technically, XOs don’t have to do this in person; she could just call down to each station from the Command and Control station line, but she wants to stretch her legs a bit.

She runs into the Chief in the hallway, and waves with her fork in lieu of speaking with her mouth full.

“Morning, Dee,” he says. “What are you doing up?”

“Night shift,” she says, after swallowing. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“Eh, I’ve been having trouble sleeping, and if I try to read, the light keeps Nicky up,” he explains. “Besides, we’re behind on recalibrating some of the targeting systems, so I figure I may as well get some work done, right?”

“You shouldn’t be playing catch-up at 0400, Chief,” Dee says, frowning. “What’s causing the delays?”

He shrugs. “Not enough hands,” he says.

“I thought you tapped some folks in Dogsville for in-house work?”

Galen chuckles, “Sorry, I meant _skilled_ hands with enough clearance. Some things civvies just can’t handle.”

“I thought we were recruiting.”

“Yeah, for pilots, maybe. But nobody wants to be a knuckle-dragger, and who would train ‘em if I had ‘em? I sure don’t have the extra time, I’m already backlogged as it is.”

They reach the ladder, and Dee pauses as he starts to climb down. “Have you told the Admiral?” she asks.

He gives her a crooked, glum smile. “Oh, he knows. I put it in every report.”

Dee hums thoughtfully. “Well, good luck, Chief.”

“You too, LT.” He gives her a casual salute before disappearing down.

 

* * *

 

Dee had been sad when she’d heard the news of the Galactica’s decommissioning, but not terribly upset. Back then, she'd always have another posting, a new home with the same structure. Once, she entertained the idea of her very own Battlestar, but she never cared which one it might be, because Sagittarons were lucky enough just to get that far without being choosy.

For Roslin’s visit and the press tour, they’d put bouquets of flowers in some of the common areas. They were, of course, fake flowers. Only dyed silk and plastic and wire. Splashes of bright, chaotic color, natural forms unnatural against the industrial bulkheads, garish in their incongruity.

After the Cylon attack, they became prized, blooms disappearing overnight and even the greenery thinning until it was gone over the weeks that followed. People needed the reminder of home, the memory of worlds they would never see and of fields and gardens now cloaked in ash, many light-years behind them.

Most reappeared in the Memorial Hallway, propped between candles or pinned next to photos of beloved, absent faces. Some could be found tucked in the shelves above crewmen’s racks, among all the other trinkets and mementos that had suddenly acquired new and bittersweet symbolic weight to their owners. Some parts of the bouquets were used as tokens passed from hand to hand.

And, somewhere, there’s a spray or two of bluebells, Dee’s favorite.

 

* * *

 

The bluebells are sitting in the middle of the tactics table when Dee gets back to the CIC. She looks around, and spots Lee up on the observation deck, clearly waiting for her.

“Better take care of that,” Kelly says. She stares at him, and she think he cracks a smile for a moment.

Dee looks up at Lee and mouths _Later_ , getting a nod in return. When she drops her gaze, she sees Sian suppressing a smile.

Her ears burn for the rest of her shift.

 

* * *

 

When she comes home, Dee is greeted by Kara’s happy squeal. “Hey, I get my bunk back!” Kara says, hugging Dee with genuine warmth.

“I missed you too,” Dee says, extricating herself only to get engulfed in Sam’s arms next.

“Lee was driving us _up the walls_ ,” he whispers conspiratorially.

“I heard that,” Lee says, hovering nearby, looking wary.

“Good,” Sam says, letting Dee go and dragging Kara out the hatch. “We’ll just be… somewhere else.”

“Breakfast!” Kara calls before the hatch closes.

“Hey, Dee,” Lee says.

Dee lifts her eyebrows. “Flowers? You thought that was enough?”

“I thought it was a _start_ ,” he offers. “I have the morning off, if you want to talk?”

“...yeah, all right,” Dee concedes.

Lee ducks his head and drops into a chair, glancing at her sidelong as she strips out of her uniform. “I should, ah, I should probably start by saying that I’m sorry.” Dee can tell this is rehearsed, can imagine him muttering it to himself as he paces the room, around and around, or traverses the hallways, or works out in the gym. “I should have talked to you. I was upset, and I wasn’t thinking, and I thought if I wrote it all down, filed it away, I’d stop feeling so-- so angry.”

“ _Angry?_ ” she asks carefully, prompting rather than challenging. Waiting.

He lowers his head, shoulders hunched and elbows propped on his knees, hands clasped together. “...scared,” he admits. She lets him talk through it, checking her blues for wear on autopilot, scanning buttons, insignia, seams, before hanging each piece in the locker. “I wasn’t thinking about your job because I was too busy worried about you losing your _life_ , about you getting stuck on the other side of the line with Kara, while I couldn’t--” He puts his head in his hands. “I could have lost you both again, and I _couldn’t--_ ”

His voice chokes closed; Dee takes pity on him and leans on the arm of his chair. “And I couldn’t leave Kara,” she says. “Trapped just out of reach? No, not again.”

Lee sighs a sad little laugh through his fingers. “Look at us both, running in circles.”

“...all of this _has_ happened before,” Dee says sardonically. “Or so they say.”

Lee lifts his head, staring straight ahead. “Okay, okay -- so how about this? If all of this _does_ happen again, we... do it better.” He looks at her. “For instance, if you’re going to run off again, can you give me a little warning?”

Dee’s mouth quirks, despite herself. “All right. And _you_ can warn _me_ the next time you’re about to do something stupid and upstanding.”

Lee gives her a strained half-smile. “I’ll do my best.” That’s good enough for now. Lee Adama’s ‘best’ is as good as a lesser man’s solemn vow.

Later, he whispers more apologies into her skin, between gentle kisses and gentler touches, as if he’s afraid any greater pressure will push her away again.

 

* * *

 

Dee tucks the bluebells over one of the pictures on the wall so that she can see them. They remind her of the high, forested peaks of Sagittaron.

One spring when she was about twelve or so, she’d gone to the capital with her parents, for an interview at Tawa Academy. It was just after the spring floods had passed, and the roads were still being repaired. Dee had gotten antsy in the car, and her parents had pulled over at a rest point so they could all stretch their legs.

In retrospect, she’d probably been driving them crazy -- she’d seen the school in brochures but never in person, and was strung like a wire with anticipation. Her father, already anxious about money but too proud to admit it, was wary of the influence that a Tawa school would bring. And yet he was too proud of his daughter winning a place at the school with her math scores to deny her.

He’d been right to worry, of course. It was in Tawa where she’d first seen Colonial Fleet soldiers, neat and shining in their uniforms as they poured off a shuttle for a little R & R in the capital. They’d seemed to _glow_ with a sense of surety and purpose that was striking compared to the people in her hometown. Not filled with righteous resentment or a grim determination, they seemed simply… happy. Confident and clear-eyed.

But before all that, she was just a twelve year old girl, holding her father’s hand as they stared down over the rolling foothills far below them. There were whole fields carpeted in bluebells, their lush rich color a reprieve after long winter months filled with gray snow and mud.

It’s a nice memory -- a good memory, one of the last she’d had with her father for a long time. She wishes she’d had one more with him, before the Cylons attacked the Colonies.

But since she doesn’t, she lets the silk bluebells remind her of what she _did_ have, that one crisp spring day when she was twelve.

 

* * *

 

The Sagittarons in Dogsville remind her of everything she _doesn’t_ miss about her home planet. Their pinched, suspicious glances at outsiders, especially those wearing the Colonial uniform; the stench of the herbal remedies most still use in lieu of actual medicine; their absolute _refusal_ to ask for help until it’s too late…

Dee does what she can to help Helo, especially when some of the civvies start showing symptoms of Mellorak sickness and the Sagittarons reject the offer of treatment. She acts as mediator, even though she feels like she’s being wedged in a vise, into an ill-fitting label that represents everything she worked so hard to escape. But for her overworked friend, for the sake of peace aboard the home she’s built and protected for so long, she puts on a pleasant face and does what she can to help.

Those nights, she comes home like she’s been running on bingo fuel for _days_. Lee frets, Sam looks sympathetic, but oddly enough it’s Starbuck who _understands_.

“I don’t know how you do it, Dee,” Kara says, pulling a chair over by the couch Dee’s sprawled over.

“Yes you do,” Dee says, muffled from behind the arm she’s got flung over her face.

“Okay, fine, correction: I don’t know how you do it without _booze_ ,” Kara says, and there’s a familiar clink of glass.

Dee holds out her free hand, remembering a Sagittaron whispering _traitor_ behind her back. “Not today I don’t. Gimme.”

Starbuck obliges. Dee can swear she can hear Kara’s smile, the little ‘click’ her mouth makes as she grins extra wide.

“Shut up,” Dee says, and Kara snorts before she taps her glass against Dee’s in a toast of solidarity.

 

* * *

 

Since she’s already so tired, Dee almost doesn’t notice she has the symptoms herself until she practically drops to the deck in Dogsville. Doctor Robert’s voice is reassuring as he helps her to a cot, and she feels the sting of a needle before her eyes slip closed.

“...baby, c’mon, please wake up. Just. Just sit up and I can help you up,” Kara’s saying, and Dee pushes through the delirium to feel desperate hands on her shoulders, pulling her off the cot. Kara sounds so _worried_. Why is she worried? Everything’s going to be fine; Doc Robert’s gave her the bittamucin. Dee just needs to rest.

“Lemme go,” she says. “I’m fine.” She pushes ineffectually at the hands on her shoulders but it’s too late, they just shift under her arms, hoisting to a more-or-less standing position.

She’s too tired to complain, though. And besides, it’s her wife holding her up; Kara’s going to take her home where she can sleep.

Dee hears Helo shouting before she passes out again.

 

* * *

 

She finds out what happened -- what Robert did to the Sagittarons -- later, and the news makes her jackknife upright in bed, tasting bile in her throat.

“I’m sorry, Dee,” Lee says. “I know they were your people…”

Dee props her elbows on her knees and presses her forehead against the heels of her hands. “No, they weren’t. But they were still _people_.” She lets out a shuddering breath. “Gods,” she moans. “How did no one _notice_?”

“I don’t know,” Lee says. “I’m just glad Helo did.” He rubs her back reassuringly. “And I’m glad you’re okay.”

It’s small comfort. But at least Robert won’t hurt anyone ever again.

“I hope they airlock him,” Dee mutters to the wall. “Throw him in with Baltar, hit the button, _whoosh_.”

“...you know about Baltar?” Lee asks.

Dee groans, hiding her face in her palms.

 

* * *

 

“That’ll be all, Jaffe,” the Admiral says as Dee enters with the morning reports.

“It’s me, sir,” she says.

He looks up at her, a flicker of surprise on his face. “Ah, yes, sorry Lieutenant, I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Everything all right?” He doesn’t seem himself; she doesn’t know when she’s become fluent in deciphering his moods, but at some point, he went from impassive cypher to to a shout on a clear channel…. and today, he seems melancholy, weighed down with a profound grief.

They haven’t lost anyone to the Cylons recently -- in fact, they’ve been blessedly free of contacts for over 48 days and 17 hours now -- so she wonders what’s caused it.

“...yeah, Dee,” he says, his heavy tone betraying the lie, “just fine.” He signs the papers and hands them back.

He doesn’t offer her coffee, doesn’t ask for gossip. Dee hovers for a few moments, then salutes and goes to work.

 

* * *

 

It’s a rough day; the Chief gets stuck in a malfunctioning airlock, and Dee spares some sympathy for Cally, stuck watching her son while her husband’s life is on the line. But Athena, Apollo, and Starbuck get him out with only minor injuries. Just another near-miss, but they keep piling up nowadays, Cylons or no, and everyone’s number comes up eventually.

Cally could have been left alone to raise Nicky; she wouldn’t be the only single parent in the Fleet, but Dee thinks she’d be worse off than most if anything happened to Galen. Cally’s not career like Dee; she wanted to be a dentist. She should be pulling teeth instead of blown fuses.

 _None of us signed up for this_ , Dee reminds herself. _We all have to muddle through somehow_.

When she gets off duty, she finds a box waiting outside their door. It’s for Lee, his name marked on the outside with the Admiral’s distinct scrawl.

“What’s this?” Lee asks when he comes home, after kissing her in greeting.

“It’s from your father,” Dee says.

Lee looks mildly alarmed. “Is it ticking?” he asks. Dee laughs, and they go over to check it out, Dee hooking her arms around Lee’s waist as he opens the flaps of the heavy carton.

Law books, and a note. “These were my grandfather’s,” Lee tells her, sounding a little awed.

“Your dad must have had them in storage all this time,” she says, flipping through one. She doesn’t know what it means, but it’s clearly a gesture from father to son. “Why’s he giving them to you now?”

 _For that day when we all have the time,_ the note reads. Lee opens his mouth then closes it, blinking rapidly.

“Tell me about it,” she says, and leads him back to the bed.

He tells her; he tells her about his father, about how today’s the anniversary of his parent’s wedding. Dee wraps him close when he talks about his mother.

Lee tells her about his grandfather, too; about having snuck into his grandfather’s study when he was young, his errant dreams when he'd entertained thoughts of defying his father’s expectations, and how he’s being assigned to help organize Baltar’s trial.

Dee presses a kiss to his hairline and wishes him luck. “You’ll need it,” she adds, and feels him smile against her neck. It’s not an assignment she’d expect him to take -- let alone _want_ \-- but at least it’s temporary.

She’ll just be glad when the trial’s over and Gaius gets what he deserves.

 

* * *

 

Two weeks later, Chief and Cally start a mutiny, which Dee only finds out about when Gaeta shows up at her door one afternoon with Nicky in his arms. “Chief’s in the brig,” he explains, “and Cally’s on her way there right now, too.” Then he adds plaintively, “...but I have a _date_.”

Dee takes the baby, who’s loose-limbed and somehow heavier with sleep. “Hoshi?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, bouncing on his feet a little as he hands the supply bag over to her, too.

“Have fun!” Dee says, waving him off, then turns back to Lee, who’s looking at them with a gobsmacked expression over a stack of his grandfather’s law books. “Sorry about this,” Dee says.

“A little warning would be nice,” he says, but she shrugs with one shoulder.

“Let’s just hope they’re not in the brig for long,” she says.

Lee snorts. “The Chief and Cally? Hah. There’s no one else my father trusts with his birds. They’ll be out in less than an hour.”

He’s right, in the end. But it’s a _long_ hour.

Dee’s pacing the halls with a fretful baby on her shoulder and spitup down the back of her last clean tanks when she spots Kara and Sam coming home. “Oh thank gods,” she says, “Can you just--”

Sam takes the proffered -- and sticky -- child, and Kara gives them both a wide-eyed look before her mouth twists uncomfortably. “You two seem to have it handled,” she says curtly, and takes off.

“Hey,” Sam points out, “She managed a full sentence that time.”

Dee rolls her eyes and goes to get a couple of towels and one of Lee’s shirts.

 

* * *

 

“Sir?” Dee says to the Admiral one morning. “I thought you should know… Baltar’s book is floating around. It might be gaining traction.” She’s seen it in the mess, pages jutting from pockets or passed furtively in corners. She’s heard people parroting the lines, some without knowing the source.

It’s nauseating. How can people so blindly accept any word from that man? Don’t they _remember?_ She grips her coffee mug tight, even though it stings her palms.

“I know,” the Admiral replies. “I’d like nothing more than to burn every copy, but…” He sighs a sad chuckle. “Principles are slippery things, Dee. Grip them too tight and they slide away.”

Even he is caught by forces stronger than himself, it seems. Lee would understand this better than she; his principles encompass all, including Baltar. Why else would he be working so hard to make the impending trial fair?

She resents it; wishes they could see what she sees. It’s not simple, but it’s _clear_.

Lee won’t talk about the trial with her -- confidentiality, he tells her -- and it seems the Admiral won’t be able to hear her this time, either. So Dee simply nods and drinks her coffee.

She’ll still keep an ear out, though. Just in case. She can feel the tremor of things shifting, the barely-audible signal of something about to change.

 

* * *

 

“Hey,” Dee says around the clips in her mouth, keeping her eyes fixed on the mirror as she pulls the iron down the length of her hair in a smooth, practiced motion.

Kara pauses in the doorway, then gives Dee a tentative smile. “Hey,” she responds, stripping down and tucking her clothes in a cubby before disappearing around the corner. Dee can hear the shower start as she separates another section out from one of the loose twists pinned atop her head.

She’s just finishing the second blow-dry when she notices Kara watching her in the mirror, a fond look on her face. Dee rubs a few drops of oil between her hands and runs her palms over a few spots, the edge of her hairline, the ends.

“I remember when you came to rescue me on New Caprica,” Kara says, her voice quiet, cautious. Dee doesn’t interrupt; her wife rarely mentions anything about her time in detention, and she knows Kara will spook if she presses too fast. “There was a bright light in the hall behind you, and all I saw at first was your silhouette. You looked like you had a halo, and it shone on the gun you were holding. My own personal avenging angel, messenger of the gods come to deliver my freedom.”

Kara steps close; her hand brushes the line of Dee’s hair where it’s still draped over one shoulder, her finger tracing over the back of Dee’s bare neck. Her mouth follows, gentle and teasing on Dee’s skin.

Dee shivers, watching their reflections with a fraction of her fragmented focus. “Have I thanked you for saving me yet?” Kara asks, and Dee sees the curl of a sly smirk tucked against her shoulder. She reaches back blindly and tugs Kara’s free hand forward, around her waist, pulling them close.

“Once or twice, maybe,” Dee replies. “But I think I could stand hearing it again.”

 

* * *

 

“I thought you were avoiding me,” Dee says sleepily, Kara’s arm a pleasant weight around her waist. Without looking, Dee runs her fingers over a patch of skin on Kara’s spine, just between her shoulderblades, where she knows there’s a familiar tattoo. It’s a close match to the one that rests on Dee’s own back, on Sam’s shoulder, over Lee’s heart.

“Nah,” her wife says, “You just stank up the joint playing daycare. It smelled like dirty diapers in there.”

Dee wrinkles her nose, laughing. “It did not.”

“Did too!” Kara says. “Last time I slept over, there was a tiny sock in the couch.”

“I hope you gave it back,” Dee replies.

“Eh, I threw it in the laundry. They’ll sort it out.”

Dee undulates in a languorous stretch, and Kara just pulls her closer, tangling their legs together. Dee missed this, Kara’s strong sleek thighs between hers, her greedy hands, her generous mouth and her intoxicating, contagious lack of shame. Not that Dee considers herself shy in bed -- Kara’s just a whole ‘nother level of brazen.

Kara’s hand traces patterns over Dee’s ribs, her stomach, fingers grazing the edge of the curls between Dee’s legs, and Dee shivers until she realizes what the pattern is.

Rings; concentric circles. Like a target, like planetary orbits, like… a mandala.

“Hey,” she says, catching Kara’s hand with her own and holding on tight. With her other hand, she reaches up to where she can see the edges of the photographs, mostly hidden behind the rest of Kara’s stuff. She snags one corner and pulls them out, feeling Kara freeze and lock up around her. “Wanna tell me about these?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Kara lies badly, trying to extricate herself enough to take them away.

Dee lets her, but turns in Kara’s arms to face her, propping her hands on Kara’s chest and her chin on the backs of her hands. Kara studiously avoids her gaze, mouth pressed in a thin line. Her whole body is trembling, like she’s about to bolt. “You don’t have to tell me,” Dee says. “Just don’t run away. Please.”

Kara juts out her chin, baring her teeth, staring up at the slats of the bunk above them. She hisses out a breath, blinking rapidly.

“Forget it,” Dee says, running a hand down Kara’s arm. “I’m sorry I said anything. Forget it.”

“Frak, Dee, I can’t forget,” Kara says in a shattered voice. “I want to, but I _can’t_.”

And slowly, haltingly, she tells Dee about Leoben, about the mandala and that she’s supposed to have some kind of ‘destiny’ and. Everything. She tells Dee _everything_.

Her whole body rattles with the speaking of it; like she’s in a Viper fighting turbulence, like the words are shaking loose from her marrow. It hurts to watch; it hurts to _feel_ , their bodies wound tightly together like they had been earlier, but this is a different kind of release.

“I’m sorry,” Dee says a few times. “I’m so sorry.” And, at the end: “Whatever it is, you don’t have to face it alone. I’m here. We’re here. Just-- just _tell_ us.”

“Sam says he believes it,” Kara whispers. Dee pushes down an irrational stab of anger -- Sam _knew!_ \-- because that had been one of their ground rules, set on the walk between their proposal and their wedding on New Caprica.

_No jealousy. No lying. Honest communication -- but don’t tell each others’ secrets. No taking sides._

“I don’t know what to believe,” Dee admits. “But whatever happens, promise me that you won’t face it alone.”

Kara blurts a short, despairing laugh, her smile more like a grimace, tears tracking sideways into her hairline. “I’m afraid, Dee… I’m afraid I won’t have a choice.”

“Even if you don’t,” Dee says firmly, “ _we_ do. And we’ll face it with you.”

Kara cups Dee’s face in her palms, drags her up and kisses her deep, desperate. “I love you, you know that, right?” Kara says when they break for air.

Dee doesn’t think Kara’s ever said it out loud before, but she nods, pressing her forehead against her wife’s. “Yeah,” she says. “I know. I love you, too.”

If she was worried about Kara before, when she was listening to her litany of demons, Dee’s _terrified_ now. But Kara seems limp, every muscle wrung out and loose from her confession.

Dee just strokes her hair until she falls asleep, then gets their boots from the door, coming back to Kara’s rack to curl close, sleepless for a long time.

Kara’s gone before she wakes up.

 

* * *

 

Four days into a Fleet refueling op near a gas giant, Starbuck chases a phantom raider into the atmosphere and Dee loses her signal for two minutes and six seconds. Then Kara climbs back from the edge of the hard deck, and Dee exhales; her joints feel like liquid and her heart's a stone knocking against her ribcage.

“Do you think she’s cracking up?” Lee asks Dee later that night, when they’re alone in their bed.

“I think we’re all cracking up,” Dee says honestly, swallowing the real answer.

 _Don’t tell each other’s secrets_ , she reminds herself. _Besides, what’s a fuel unrep and a ghost bogey have to do with Kara’s destiny?_

It seems too anticlimactic for _Starbuck_.

 

* * *

 

Apollo joins Starbuck on her next patrol, and their easy banter weaves an informal patterns in and out of the CIC’s structured cadence. It’s a jarring, sour note when the phantom raider returns, and Dee feels the ripple it sends through the room, starting with the Admiral. Kara chases her phantom all the way off their Dradis screens. Dee takes a deep breath, listening.

“Starbuck, report!” Lee’s shouting, over and over. “This is Apollo, do you read me? _Kara!_ ”

There is only the long hiss of static, then:

“Lee,” Starbuck responds, sounding calm. Sounding _young_. “I’m not afraid anymore.”

“Say again?” Lee asks.

“I’m not afraid anymore,” Kara repeats.

There are other people talking; Dee tunes them out, plugs her free ear so she won’t be distracted.

“All right, Kara, listen to me,” Lee says. “Forget the damn toaster. Climb now or you’re dead.”

 _Climb,_ Dee prays, _climb, climb._

A long pause.

“We can still pull out of this,” Lee’s saying. “We haven’t gone past the point of no return. Kara!”

Gaeta’s pulling on Dee’s sleeve, trying to tell her something; she pulls away from his grasp. She realizes she can _do_ something.

“Starbuck,” she says into the mic, “This is Galactica actual, do you copy?” No response. “Starbuck, this is Galactica. Please respond.”

She thinks back to the night before their wedding, the first night all four of them had spent together.

“ _I remember,” Kara said, looping her elbow around Dee's and gesturing expansively with the hand holding the bottle, “how every pilot onboard had a crush on you within a month of your arrival.”_

 _That had made Dee laugh, louder than she'd expected. “Oh my gods, not_ _all_ _of them.”_

“ _Every single one of us,” Kara confirmed. “You were the voice that guided us, out there in the black. Like Galactica herself, calling us home.”_

“This is Galactica actual, Starbuck. Come home,” Dee says now. “I repeat: _come home_.”

Then, Lee: “Visual, visual, okay. Kara, I’m coming to get you.”

“Lee,” Kara says. “Dee. I’ll see you on the other side.”

“Kara,” Dee pleads, “ _Come home_.”

“Kara, please, listen to me,” Lee is saying, “Come back.”

“Just let me go,” Kara whispers, almost too faint for Dee to catch.

“Gods damn it Kara,” Lee says, “You come back! Come back!”

Dee might be shouting it, too.

“It’s okay,” Kara says. “Just let me go. They’re waiting for me.”

Someone’s pulling the headset from Dee, gentle but firm. She scrabbles for it, she has to listen, has to hear, has to _know_ …

There’s a marine towing her away from her station. Dee’s throat feels ragged from screaming; her face is wet. Everything is noise, except for the sound of Lee screaming over the speakers:

“No! _No!_ ”

Dee is dragged out of the CIC, reaching back towards the voices, her lifelines to sanity. Lee’s close to the hard deck, too. She wonders if he’ll follow Kara down. She has no way of knowing, of seeing what’s happening. The marines bar her way.

She closes her eyes, tries to listen, tries to hear through the static.

The Admiral asks, “Lee, do you have her in sight? Can you see her?”

Silence; then Lee responds, “Negative. She… she went in. She went in… Her ship’s in pieces.” His voice is broken, too. “Her ship’s in pieces. Her ship… is lost.”

Dee reels away from the black-clad sentinels whose job is done for now. Her back runs into the far wall, and she sags against it, blind and numb.

 _Lost_ , she thinks. A piece of herself, gone, lost on a fool’s errand, too far gone to turn back. Crushed in the atmosphere of a random planet not even noteworthy enough to name.

She can’t exhale, can’t breathe without sobbing.

 

* * *

 

Dee ends up in the hangar bay; remembers the journey in flashes. Crewmen giving her a wide berth, clearing a path. Some look confused. Others shocked. No one tries to stop her. No one touches her until she reaches the flight deck.

She spots Lee, climbing down the ladder on autopilot, his eyes wide and red-rimmed. He sees Dee and stops in his tracks, fingers mid-fumble on the fastenings of his flight suit.

“Dee,” he says, cracked and raw, and she rushes into his arms. Her head tucks up under his chin, her face against his throat, just how they’ve always fit together, but it doesn’t work today. His collar juts into her jaw, her elbows knock against his ribs. “I couldn’t--” he says. “She just--”

Their legs sway and buckle; they fall to their knees, keeping each other upright but just barely. Dee weeps into his shoulder. People are probably staring. She doesn’t care.

“Dee,” Lee croaks after an eternity of grief, “Dee, get up. We… we have to go home.” She pulls back, stares up at him uncomprehendingly. She doesn’t know where home _is_. “We have to find Sam.”

 _Oh gods_ , she thinks. _Sam_.

Lee helps her up off the deck.

 

* * *

 

They find their husband in the hallway outside their quarters, wild-eyed and pacing. “Sam,” Lee says, reaching out with Dee.

Sam hits him; a straight punch to the face, no finesse but surprise on his side. Lee staggers back, touching his lip. His fingers come away wet, a red streak vivid across his mouth.

“You let her go!” Sam bellows, stepping forward again. “You _let_ her--”

Lee spreads his arms wide, lifts his chin. Braces for the next blow. Sam stops, his bloody hand flexing by his side, his lungs heaving for air.

“Sam,” Dee says, reaching out. Sam leans into the hand she rests on his upper arm, just for a moment.

Then he shakes it off. “No,” he says. “No, I can’t--” He takes a step back, then another. “I gotta-- I _can’t_. I just.”

He backs away from them, and Dee follows for a few feet before Lee calls her name.

“Dee,” Lee says. “Let him go; give him space. He’ll come home.”

 _Will he?_ Dee thinks, but returns to Lee anyway. “Let’s get you some ice,” she says. She doesn’t have anything else to do; better the infirmary than their empty quarters.

 

* * *

 

Dee wakes up in the middle of the night, chasing Starbuck’s voice out of unconsciousness into the darkness of their room. She holds her breath, listens close, but can only hear Lee’s quiet snores.

She throws on some pants and a sweatshirt, patrolling the hallways barefoot. The pilots are all asleep in their racks; she slips in silently and twitches aside the closed curtains of Starbuck’s bunk. Sam’s in there, curled up around a bottle.

She pulls it away from him and he murmurs, still mostly asleep, “...Kara?”

“It’s just me,” Dee whispers, smoothing his hair away from his forehead.

He wakes a little more, his face crumpling in the dim light. “Dee?”

“Shh,” she says. “Go back to sleep.”

She crawls into the bunk with him, burying her face in Kara’s pillow. She lets herself cry again, quietly, as Sam falls back into slumber behind her. She tries to remember the feeling of being anchored in his arms, but can’t find comfort in the memory now.

Sleep rushes in again like a flood, and she succumbs to the exhaustion dragging her under.

 

 

* * *


	4. Chapter 4

There is a funeral, with an empty casket and heavy voices. Sam shows up, looking like a raw bruise in his dress grays, his blue eyes dark and shuttered as he stands on Dee’s left. Lee’s on her right, but neither man looks at the other.

Per tradition for group marriages, the oldest surviving spouse speaks first, if they wish to. “From the moment we met, I fought with Kara,” Lee says at the podium. “We fought ourselves, each other, the Cylons... We fought with and for and beside each other -- but always _together_.” He takes a shaky breath. “I’m just sorry that I couldn't… I couldn’t fight for her in the battle that mattered most, in the end.”

Sam tells the story of how he met Kara. “...she promised she’d come back and save me. And she did, again and again. She saved every one of us, over and over, and she still thought she was a frak-up.” He shakes his head, eyes glittering. “I just hope that, wherever she is, she can see the final score and know -- _really_ know -- how many owe her their lives. How much we’ve all lost, now that she’s gone.” His voice cracks at the end, and Dee has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep her body upright, keep it from folding into sorrow.

Dee doesn’t speak, but takes the folded flag as the youngest surviving spouse. Laura -- President Roslin -- hugs her, and it jostles loose one tear from the multitudes Dee’s been blinking away all day.

The pilots hold a wake in the mess. “Go on,” Dee says to Lee, looking for Sam, but he’s already gone.

“You sure?” Lee says. “I can--”

“Go,” she says again, throat thick. “You’re the CAG. You have to go.”

His face is tight and pinched; she can tell he’d rather not, but she won’t give him the easy excuse. Besides, she can’t carry the weight of his grief and her own, not right now. The flag is a millstone in her arms, and she has to put it down someplace quiet, someplace safe.

When she gets back to their quarters, she tucks it on one of the shelves, behind the statues of Athena and Aphrodite. She presses a kiss to her fingertips and touches the base of each, as she did back on New Caprica every morning before she’d gone to Gaeta to beg for news of her wife.

There is no one to plead with now, only a cold, hollow certainty. Dee turns away from the statues and gets a bottle and a glass, falling onto the couch in a reckless sprawl. Something prods her in the thigh, and she sets down the bottle with a grumble to dig for the offending protrusion.

It’s Kara’s battered folding knife. Its handle is nicked, and she opens it to see that its blade is tarnished, but it still has a keen edge. Dee weighs it in her hand, flips it over, tests its balance.

Then she throws it in a sudden motion, across the room to stick in one of the logbooks on the shelf above the flag. It quivers there a moment. Dee considers pulling her father’s knife from her pocket and sending it to keep Kara’s blade company. It would be poetic, almost, the two blades hovering there above Kara’s failed patrons.

Dee snorts at herself. _Screw poetry_ , she thinks. _I have alcohol_.

She pours herself a drink.

 

* * *

 

Dee runs on autopilot for two weeks; Lee comes home late, distant and distracted. They don’t talk much. He occasionally complains about the trial or that day’s CAP. In return, she makes the right noises or tells him about the latest scuttlebutt, but they don’t really look each other in the eyes while they’re listening, always focused on something else or glancing away into the empty space around them.

Dee avoids the duty locker, even though she knows when Sam will be there. Instead, she sometimes looks for him at Joe’s, usually when the silence starts getting to her and she needs the noise. He’s there every time she checks, tucked away at a table in the back.

They drink together; they don’t talk. She is tempted, some nights, to take the glass from him and crawl into his lap, bite at his mouth until it opens and they speak in Kara’s tongue for a night.

Dee doesn’t do it, though. She imagines Kara laughing at them all and smiles into her drink.

It’s nice to remember Kara’s laugh. She misses it more than anything else.

 

* * *

 

“...so the Admiral assigned me to protection detail,” Lee tells her.

Dee lifts her eyebrows. “Now you’re _protecting_ that motherfrakker?”

Lee sighs. “Looks like it, yeah.” He doesn’t look happy about it, but from the rumors she’s heard about his last couple of weeks as CAG, it’s probably for the best that he’s grounded for a bit.

She just wishes it weren’t for the sake of _Baltar’s_ rotten carcass, is all.

 

* * *

 

The Admiral’s ship is broken, listing drunkenly on a back shelf with snapped masts and snaggle-toothed railing. When she brings him the overnights, he offers her coffee as usual, asks about the little things -- crew morale, updates on the new recruitment program -- but she can tell his words tangle up like the rigging on his model before he can ask the big question.

“How are you, Dee?” he attempts just once, worry in his weathered blue eyes.

“...managing, sir,” she replies, her tongue sticky and slow. “It’s hard, but then, it’s not easy on anybody, is it?”

The creases on his face rearrange themselves into sympathy, and she sees an echo of her own loss there, before he shutters his gaze again. “No, it never is” he says in a voice so low she almost misses it. He clears his throat and speaks louder, “Well, you’ll let me know if you need anything, won’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” she says, smiling faintly in gratitude. “Thank you, sir.” She can see him drawing back, sinking away into his thoughts, and thinks her presence might be doing more harm than good at the moment. “...if you don’t mind, I should get to the CIC.”

“Of course,” he says, lifting his chin and returning her smile, just a little.

 

* * *

 

There are Marine sentries at her door.

“Let me in,” she says. “Those are my quarters.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” Cheadle tells her. “Major’s orders.”

“What?” she asks. “My husband told you to guard our quarters? Why?”

Cheadle leans in conspiratorially. “Baltar’s lawyer wanted a secure room.”

“For wha--?” Dee asks, and then she realizes.

“Please tell the major he can come find me when they’re done in there,” she says to Cheadle, who nods. Her voice doesn’t shake at all, which she counts as a victory.

Dee walks away, wanting to burn everything she owns as soon as she gets back in there.

 

* * *

 

She looks for Sam in the mess, in the gym, asleep in bed, knowing he’s not on duty. He’s nowhere to be found, and everyone she asks responds with a baffled shrug. She cuts through Memorial Hall, heading to Joe’s, hoping he hasn’t started drinking _this_ early.

She almost trips over him, only his boots visible in the walkway, the rest of him half-hidden behind one of the makeshift altars. His calm, quiet expression is a balming contrast to her unfocused irritation. “...hi,” she says. “Am I bothering you?”

“Nah,” he says. “I’m just staring at a hole, anyway.” He gestures to the wall, and Dee squints. The board is covered with photographs and drawings and notes, layered so closely that some are only slivers. “She’s supposed to be up there by Kat,” he says, “but I guess Lee hasn’t gotten _around_ to it yet.”

Dee presses her lips together, unsurprised. “Ten credits say he carries it around with him,” she says. With her back to the wall, she slides down until she’s sitting on the floor beside him.

“Pass. That’s a sucker's bet,” Sam says. They’re quiet for several long minutes, staring up at Kat. “She killed herself,” Sam declares, sure and calm. Dee stares at him. “I think she did it twice. Once with the pills Kara gave her--” _oh, he’s talking about Kat_ “--but she was already dead before that. And she did it to save the Faru Sadin.”

Dee nods. “Hell of a pilot,” she says.

“I keep sitting here,” Sam continues, “I keep _sitting_ here, looking for Kara’s reason. I keep trying to come up with a neat answer, but the truth is... we’ll never know.”

Dee flinches. She doesn’t want to talk about this; she’s been trying to avoid _thinking_ about it. “She said.. _they’re waiting for me,_ ” she says, feeling as if the words are being dredged in leaden pieces from the bottom of her gut.

Sam’s face convulses in a rictus of empty humor. “You know what I did, after we ran off from New Caprica, leaving you behind?” She’s never heard him say it so baldly as that; she thought that they’d long ago reassured him of _tactical necessities_ , but apparently not. “I signed up, threw on a jock smock, flew her bird, slept in her rack… waiting. Keeping the light on.” He pulls his knees up, drags his hands down his face. “And… I feel like I’m doing it all over again. I’m always waiting for Kara _frakking_ Thrace, and this time, I don’t even know _why_ anymore.”

Dee thinks of circles within circles, of patterns repeating again and again. She thinks of complex systems, and of decaying orbits.

“Are you going to come back home?” Dee asks, very quiet. Almost a whisper.

“You find it, I’ll join you,” Sam says, eyes keen as he searches her expression. “But I don’t know how much waiting I got left in me.”

Dee doesn’t know how to respond.

 

* * *

 

“Gaius Baltar was in here!” Dee shouts at Lee. “Looking at our things, using our furniture, touching--” She cuts herself off, feeling nauseated. “You didn’t even _ask!_ ”

“There wasn’t time,” Lee says. “You were on duty, and Lampkin insisted--”

“There were a thousand other places they could have gone, Lee. Did you maybe think about an airlock? I’m sure there aren’t any bugs in _those_.”

“Dee--”

“ _No_ ,” she says, grabbing a bag. “I’m done. I’m going to go find a rack until you’re done with this assignment and have sterilized everything Baltar even breathed on. Let me know when you’re done playing bodyguard instead of being a _soldier_.”

“That’s not fair, Dee,” Lee says weakly, looking pale as she stuffs a few spare clothes into the bag.

“You want things to be _fair_ , Lee?” she asks, staring him down. “I haven’t seen much of ‘fair’ since that bastard handed our asses to the Cylons on a silver platter. ‘Fair’ would be him dying in the New Caprica mud.” On impulse, Dee pulls Kara’s knife from the bookshelf, holding it up between them. “‘Fair’ would be me slitting his throat myself the next time he sets foot in _my_ quarters.” She folds the knife up with a snap. “But since my husband’s inviting him in and watching his ass to boot, I should probably be elsewhere for the duration.”

“Dee--” Lee says, reaching out.

She shakes off his hand and grabs her bag. “Come talk to me when things are _fair_ ,” she says, and leaves.

Kara’s rack is too crowded, with Kara’s ghost and Sam’s grief, so Dee goes in the opposite direction, towards the officers’ quarters, where she’s unlikely to see pilots at all. If her husbands want her, they can come find her.

 

* * *

 

Kelly deserves a medal, as far as Dee’s concerned. Instead, he’s in the brig for his attempts on Baltar’s life, and for the bystander casualties and injuries he caused.

 _At least that’s over_ , Dee thinks.

“Remove Apollo from the board,” the Admiral barks, striding into the CIC. “Inform Helo he’s to remain at CAG.” He puts on his glasses, muttering bitterly, “My son has more important things to tend to.”

Dee’s eyes go wide. _This should be over_ , she thinks. _Why isn’t it over?_

 

* * *

 

With Helo as CAG and Lee... busy working elsewhere, Dee, Hoshi, and Gaeta are left to cover the night shift rotation as 2IC, with Tigh or Adama on call as needed. It’s disorienting, swinging her clock around every few days, but she prefers the exhaustion. It keeps her from tossing on the thin mattress of her bunk, keeps her from thinking too much before she falls asleep.

And when she can’t, she returns to old habits, haunting the gym at all hours and beating her knuckles raw on the punching bag.

Helo finds her one night, holds the bag steady. “You going to the trial?” he asks.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” she says. “Rank has its privileges, right?”

“Abso-frakking-lutely,” he says with relish. “Watch your elbows, you’re locking up.”

“Who’s handling Dogsville?” she asks.

“Hadrian,” he says. “But I still check in, give her pointers.”

Dee huffs a laugh. “Bet she loves that.”

“She’s doing all right, actually,” he admits. “I think it’s good for her. How’s Lee doing?”

“I wouldn’t know,” she says, throwing a wild left hook.

“That bad, huh.”

“How’s Athena doing?” she asks.

“Not thrilled with the night shifts, but we’re managing.” His mouth thins into a thoughtful line. “You know, you’re welcome to visit anytime.”

Dee drops her fists and stares at him. “Do _not_ tell me you want to give plural relationships a whirl.”

He laughs, loud and bright in the empty gym. “Oh gods, no,” he says. “No offense, just-- no. That’s not for us. Why, have you been getting offers?”

Dee shrugs, putting her hands back up and throwing a neat combo, “Every now and then, we used to, ‘till we made it clear that ‘group’ is not synonymous with ‘open.’ And I’ve been getting the eye again lately.” She pulls an exaggerated leer as example, then shakes her head.

“Well, with Lee living alone, and Sam spotted more often with Seelix than either of you, and Kara--” Helo swallows hard, then continues, “...well, it might not be a matter of folks considering joining the group so much as--”

“Thinking there’s no group to join,” Dee finished for him, pausing again.

“...or that you deserve better, maybe.” He shrugs. “I’m not sure. All I know is, _I_ have no ulterior motives in that regard.”

Dee arches an eyebrow. “In that regard? You do have an ulterior motive, though?”

Helo chews his lip. “Well, Chief says you’re good with Nicky...”

She shakes one finger at him. “I am _not_ the ship’s day care,” she says. He lifts his hands in surrender.

“Sure, sure, but it’d be nice to be able to hang out with someone who isn’t kid-shy. _And_ who isn’t weird about Sharon. It’s a rare combination. Even Gaeta gets skittish, sometimes.”

Dee wants to be surprised about the Sharon thing, but fails. It _would_ be nice to have someplace else to go, those evenings when she feels like she’s rattling around in a bunk both too big and too small at once. “Yeah, okay,” she says.

 

* * *

 

Dee gets to watch the first day of Baltar’s trial in person, the multiple lengthy charges of treason still seeming insufficient for the devastation his actions caused. Lee spots her in the crowd and gives her a sad smile, but gets quickly dragged off by the defense attorney. Whatshisname. Lampkin. He’s a shifty-looking dude with a voice like a gravel road, limping around with exaggerated care on his cane. Why Lee gives him the time of day, Dee doesn’t know.

That’s not right. She knows why: _principle_. Lee’s moral compass needs a good shake.

 

* * *

 

On the second day of the trial, she has to listen in on the wireless. Racetrack and Sam spotted Cylons in their wake, and Dee’s combing through the channels, looking for a hidden tracking signal.

Fortunately, she can run her algorithms on post-jump communications and keep an ear on the trial simultaneously. When she hears Tigh’s confession about Ellen, she stifles a gasp.

“Find something, Dee?” Felix asks from his station, going over their previous path with as many fine-toothed combs he’s got at his disposal, too.

“No, it’s nothing,” she says, then drops her voice to a whisper, “Tell you later.”

She remembers that night, remembers figuring out that it was Ellen who’d given them up. Remembers Saul and Galen having a muttered conversation, ending in the latter hissing, “-- take care of it!”

In the chaos of the next morning, Dee hadn’t known what happened to Ellen. She’d assumed that the Colonel’s wife died with so many -- too many! -- others in the exodus.

It explains quite a bit, in retrospect. She doesn’t know whether to sympathize with Tigh, or to be completely terrified of the man. Dee hasn’t any stones to throw, though. They’d all done things on New Caprica that they’d never dream of doing under other circumstances.

She wonders what she’d have done in his place; what she’d do if she found out that Lee or Sam were Cylon collaborators. Her mind recoils from the thought.

“Will someone turn off that music?!” Tigh shouts on the radio.

 

* * *

 

Lee is wearing a suit. _Where did he get a suit?_ Dee wonders. Lampkin addresses him as _“Mister_ Adama,” and the Admiral’s face freezes into immobile inscrutability as Lee stands.

_What did I miss?_

Next to her, Helo and Gaeta mutter their own confusion to each other.

And then, slowly and methodically, Lee dismantles the President of the Colonies in front of the judges, the rest of the people in the room, and with everyone in the whole godsdamned fleet listening in on the wireless. He falters a few times, looks out at the audience once with furrowed brow, but his aim is unerring.

Dee watches, her hand creeping to her chin, then to cover her mouth, increasingly appalled. Helo locks down like a vault when Hera is mentioned, arms crossed over his chest and his eyes glaring daggers at Lee. Gaeta’s hands are in fists between his knees as he leans forward on his elbows, looking as if he’s two minutes away from launching himself at Gaius and ending this himself.

When the president admits that she’s still taking chamalla because her cancer’s come back, Dee gets up and leaves.

 

* * *

 

Dee had thought that after the trial, Lee would be done with whatever fit of virtue he’d gotten stuck in, that he’d apologize again, and she would be able to go home. She’d thought the trial would be the end of it.

It is the end -- in the worst possible way. After what Lee’s done, the idea of any space with him in it as _home_ is dissonant and strange. He’s betrayed the trust of so many, so dramatically, that there’s no going back.

Lee finds her packing the last of her things; they fight again, and she leaves. For good this time.

Dee drops her stuff onto her bunk, knuckling away a few furious tears. After a minute of hitching breaths, she makes herself get up and put away her things before she just starts crying and never stops.

She didn’t have much left to shift, even for a smaller locker. The old one had been shared four ways, after all. She finds a little black dress she hasn’t worn since New Caprica, and shakes it out, wondering whether she should hang it up or give it away.

 _Frak it_ , Dee thinks. _Frak it, frak him, frak all of it._

 

* * *

 

“Do you hear that?” Sam asks, lounging languidly in Kara’s rack. Dee had found him easily enough at the bar; she doesn’t know if he’d been waiting, but he’d been nonplussed when she’d taken the seat beside him.

Being with him might not be _home_ again yet, but at least it’s a familiar haven.

“Hear what?” Dee replies as she’s dropping the dress back over her shoulders. She wiggles into it then cocks her head, listening.

“The music… what is that song?”

“I don’t hear anything,” she says. He shakes his head and reaches for her.

“Come back here,” he says. His fingers start creeping back up her skirt, and Dee laughs against his mouth. “I missed your legs,” he murmurs between kisses. “I missed your smile, I missed your voice, I missed your--” His fingers finish the sentence for him, and Dee gasps in a lungful of air before she’s submerged in his kiss again.

There’s a knock at the hatch. “Frak,” Sam says, getting up. Dee scrambles to straighten her clothing.

“Hey,” Seelix says, coming in with some other pilots. “Why’s the door locked?”

“Sorry,” Sam says, ducking his head.

Seelix spots Dee and her face falls. Dee gives her a little wave, feeling both awkward and a little smug. _Yep, he’s still technically married, Hardball,_ she wants to say, but that’s probably not a good idea. Even if she’s still got enough restless energy to feel like picking a fight, Dee doesn’t say a word.

Sam tilts his head at the door with a query in his eyes, and Dee nods in relief, getting up.

 

* * *

 

“So you left Lee?” Sam asks, handing Dee the bottle.

She takes a burning swig and swallows. “Yup. I never thought I would. I thought if it all fell apart, it would be Lee and Kara fighting, or one of us--” she gestures at herself and Sam “--getting sick of the whole Apollo-and-Starbuck show, y’know? I didn’t think that Kara was gonna...”

Sam stares up at the ceiling of the raptor, looking wrecked. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I know. She always seemed… indestructible, you know? The shit she went through on New Caprica, what she went through to rescue me, the frakking farm, her mom… I thought if anyone was going to bite it first, it was going to be me.”

Dee passes the bottle, lets him drink instead of talk for a second. Regain his composure. “And I sure as _hell_ never thought that I’d leave Lee if Kara weren’t a factor.”

Sam blinks a couple of times. “Kara’s always going to be a factor,” he says.

Dee gesticulates wildly at him. “You’re right, you’re right, but see, that’s my whole point. I didn’t think she’d be a factor like _this_. I didn’t expect to fall in love with either of you, and look, here I am.”

Sam grins at her. “Here you are?” he asks, a soft, fond light in his eyes.

Dee can’t remember if she’s ever told him before. She smiles back. “Here I am,” she repeats, quieter now.

He crawls over to her, cups her face in his palms. “Here _we_ are,” he whispers.

“Yeah?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he breathes, and his palms skim up her thighs again.

 

* * *

 

The radio broadcasts Gaeta’s lies at the trial. Even if he hadn’t confided in her before, she knows him well enough to pick up the falsehood in his voice, the total lack of hesitation or regret. She starts to comprehend what Lee means, about credibility and accountability. Not enough, not for her to bear _Baltar_ , but a little.

Then Lee takes the stand.

His voice is stripped bare of polish, nerve and sinew and passion in every syllable. “...this case,” he’s saying after an abridged litany of their collective sins, “This case is built on emotion, on anger, bitterness, vengeance. But most of all, it is built on shame.” His words falter for a moment, then pick up again, determined. “It's about the shame of what we did to ourselves back on that planet. It's about the guilt of those of us who ran away.” Dee’s hands grip the edge of her console. The Cylons could attack right now and she wouldn’t notice. “Who _ran away_. And we're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on one man and then flush him out the airlock, and hope that just gets rid of it all. So that we could live with ourselves. But that won't work. That won't work. That's not justice; not to me. _Not to me._ ”

Dee swipes at her face with the back of her hand and is surprised to find it dry. Perhaps she’s run out of tears.

 

* * *

 

Gaius is spared. They find this out during Dee’s lunch, and the mess hall erupts into a chorus of angry shouting at the wireless. She edges along the walls behind everyone’s backs and goes to the Admiral’s office.

He arrives moments after she does.

“Not now, Lieutenant,” he says, clipped and closed.

“Sir--” she says. Comm traffic is going to be a mess; there’ll be security issues, possibly more attacks on Baltar’s life while he’s still on Galactica, and then there’s the legitimacy of his book to consider…

Most of all, though, she has a thousand questions, too many to untangle, but she wants a moment with him to try.

“I won’t discuss the trial,” he says, “or anything related to _Gaius Baltar_.” He says the name as if it’s a barbed, squirming thing lodged in his throat.

That leaves only one thing, really. “...are you okay?”

He pauses, his formal jacket half-unbuttoned, and spares her a glance. She can’t read it; it looks like rue and gratitude and amusement, perhaps. “Not in the slightest,” he rumbles. “But we’ll pull through.”

“Yes, sir,” she says. “Any special orders for the day?”

“Tight lid for a few days, I think. It’s going to get uglier before it gets better.”

“Yes, sir,” Dee repeats.

“Dismissed, Lieutenant,” he says, and she salutes, pivoting to go. Her foot knocks against something that skids across the deck to hit the wall. She bends to retrieve it, and is just standing again when there’s a sharp rapping at the door.

She pauses, looks to the Admiral. He grunts. “That’ll be the president,” he says, and starts buttoning up his jacket again. “Better let her in.”

It is; she does, and it’s not until she reaches the CIC that she realizes she still has the object in her hand. Cool metal to the touch when she picked it up, it’s now warm from her palm, edges digging into her fingers.

It’s a small gold figurine of Aurora. _Goddess of the dawn,_ she thinks. _Brings the morning star and a fair wind. A fresh start._

Dee tucks it into her pocket, where it clinks dully against her father’s knife. She’ll give it to the Admiral at the end of her shift.

 

* * *

 

They jump to the nebula, and Dee starts counting ships. She can manage in under a minute, scanning names on the Dradis by their first few letters, their standard configuration mapped to memory.

“Commence Dradis scan,” the Admiral orders, “Let’s see what’s out there.”

Everything flickers and goes dark.

There’s a moment of confusion, then everyone snaps to emergency procedures they’ve drilled a thousand times.

“...we have negative auxillary power,” Dee reports. “We’re on batteries only.”

“Get ready for an engine restart,” the Admiral says, voice steady and calm in the center of the whirlwind of activity. Flashlights strobe across her peripheral vision and Dee blocks them out, focuses on her screen and the sounds, the only inputs that matter right now.

There are several long minutes of fruitless labor, nothing responding as it should. Dee can hear Gaeta muttering curses under his breath at Tactical. She relays intel as fast as she can to help, but the other ships and stations are responding slowly or giving overlapping reports that Dee has to unjumble.

The lights flicker on as abruptly as they’d gone out, with no explanation.

“...some kind of power surge,” the Admiral tells the President. “Give me a damage report immediately.”

“Power outage was Fleet-wide, Admiral,” Dee reports, looking over her shoulder. “It was also simultaneously restored to all ships.” She has no explanation, only the facts.

“Admiral!” the President blurts as the alarms start beeping. “Admiral!”

“Dradis contact!” Gaeta calls. “Massive Cylon fleet on intercept course!”

Well, there’s _one_ explanation.

 

* * *

 

“Alert vipers are away,” Gaeta reports.

“Who’s in Viper Three?” Helo asks. Dee scans the call signs on her screen and suppresses an incredulous laugh.

She has one guess, and would bet everything she has left on being right.

Sure enough, Lee sings out, “Galactica, Apollo, I’m in Viper Three. I have a bogey at my ten. I’m gonna go check it out.” His little dot peels away from the formation, arcing towards port. “...where’d he go?” Apollo mutters. “Where the frak did you go?”

 _Another ghost bogey?_ Dee frowns, biting her tongue. _You don’t want to get dragged out by Marines_ , she tells herself. _Not_ _again_.

“Whoa, what the _frak?_ ” Lee exclaims.

A long pause, then: “Hi Lee.”

Dee’s heart stutters to a stop, and she glances around to see if anyone else heard that over the speakers. Has she finally cracked?

If she has, Lee’s gone over the deep end with her. “Kara?”

Dee notices Gaeta and Helo looking at her; crewmen at other stations are glancing her way. She gives them all a wide-eyed stare. The Admiral is watching the overhead console, mouth agape.

“Don’t freak out, Lee,” Starbuck says. “It really is me.” And then she laughs, a low, delighted chuckle that sends the hairs on Dee’s arms upright.

“What the frak?” Lee says.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Starbuck says. She sounds so certain, so _true_. Dee exhales a breath she feels like she’s been holding for months. “I’ve been to Earth. I know where it is. And I’m gonna take us there.”

 

 

 

\- TBC in the next installment of the series, _Precession_ -

**Author's Note:**

> All hail Knitmeapony, comma-slayer and feels-wrangler, for inspiring my best work and bolstering my confidence when I didn't think I had any left in me.


End file.
